Anywhere out of the World Translating Décadence in Japanese Literature, 1885-1925 Isabelle Lavelle 5615D011-9 January 24, 2018

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Anywhere Out of the World Translating Décadence in Japanese Literature, 1885-1925

Isabelle Lavelle 5615D011-9 January 24, 2018

A doctoral dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies Waseda University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Professor Adrian Pinnington for the continuous support, for his patience, motivation, and immense knowledge. His guidance and passion helped me in all the steps of this research.

I would like to thank my sub-advisors, Professor Graham Law and Professor Morita Norimasa, for their insightful comments and encouragement, which incentivized me to widen my research from various perspectives. I am also grateful to Professor Asō Takashi for his careful reading and numerous helpful comments.

This research was made possible thanks to the generous funding of the Japanese Ministry of Education.

I also thank my fellow Ph.D. candidates Paula Martínez and Hayakawa Yumiko for the stimulating discussions and for the friendship we have had in the last three years.

Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Dr. Tarek Katramiz, for proofreading and formatting the thesis, and for contributing to my foray into Decadence. TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION------1

PART ONE. THE DECADENT MILIEU ------23

CHAPTER ONE

TRANSLATION AS A CREATIVE ART. THE LANGUAGE OF DECADENCE ------28 1. Introducing Symbolism: Ueda Bin’s Linguistic Revolution ------29 2. Kaichōon’s Legacy: the Poet-Translator ------43 3. The Japanese Language of Decadence ------55

CHAPTER TWO

TRANSLATING ART AND LIFE: JAPANESE AESTHETICISM AND DECADENCE------66 1. Against Naturalism? Decadent Individualism ------68 2. Worshipping Pan: Aestheticism as a Lifestyle ------81 3. The Past Revisited. Edo/Tokyo as the Capital of Decadence ------92

PART TWO. A PERMANENT EXILE ------101

CHAPTER THREE

‘THE DECADENT IS ANOTHER’: THE AESTHETICS OF NOT BELONGING ------103 1. The Eternal Foreigner ------104 2. France: the Promised Land ------111 3. Domesticating the Foreign: An Aesthetic of Hybridity ------117

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DECADENT DISCOURSE OF OTHERNESS------137 1. Objectifying Otherness: Japan and Orientalism------138 2. Anti-modern Japonism: Through the Lens of Pierre Loti------152

CONCLUSION ------168

BIBLIOGRAPHY ------173 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

HDZ - Horiguchi Daigaku zenshū (The Complete Works of Horiguchi Daigaku). 9 vols. Tokyo: Ozawa, 1983.

KMZ - Kinoshita Mokutarō zenshū (The Complete Works of Kinoshita Mokutarō). 24 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1981.

KHSS - Kitahara Hakushū sakuhin shū (Anthology of Works of Kitahara Hakushū). 6 vols. Tokyo: Kawade, 1952.

OZ - Ōgai zenshū (The Complete Works of Ōgai). 38 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1972.

KZ - Kafū zenshū (The Complete Works of Kafū). 30 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1992.

SHZ - Satō Haruo zenshū (The Complete Works of Satō Haruo). 12 vols. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1969.

UBZ - Ueda Bin zenshū (The Complete Works of Ueda Bin). 10 vols. Tokyo: Kyōiku shuppan sentā, 1980. INTRODUCTION

In a 1911 essay, Nagai Kafū wonders: ‘What will be left on this Japanese land [...] when the beauty of the landscape will have been unsparingly destroyed for the “progress” of civilisation”?’ (KZ, vol. 9, p. 133)1 The individualist and Francophile Kafū (Katō Shūichi, 2004, p. 171), the hedonist aesthete famously censored for speaking up against his countrymen’s increasing militarism following the Russo- Japanese War (Rubin, 1984, pp. 117-125), also developed in his works a consistent critique of modernity. In the short story Dentsūin (The Dentsū Temple, 1911), he deplores how ‘the trend of Démocratie and Positivisme is erasing day by day the last beautiful colours of history, relentlessly killing the dream of the anachronistic poet’ (KZ, vol. 7, p. 206).2 ‘Démocratie’ and ‘Positivisme’, written in Roman letters, jar with the surrounding Japanese text. Does Kafū use the French words rather than their Japanese equivalent to better denounce democracy and positivism as foreign bodies, or is he hinting towards a shared intellectual distaste that goes beyond the Japanese borders, thus including his discourse within a larger transcultural and translinguistic context? In these two hypotheses, which are not necessarily antithetical, lies the founding ambiguity of Japanese Decadence; inheriting its pessimistic vision from Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and others, while the very ills being denounced are born out of the philosophical and technological advances that make intercontinental exchanges — of both body and mind — easier than ever been before. Kafū justifying his self-proclaimed aversion to democracy and positivism by favouring aesthetics over practicality and rationality positions the Japanese writer as a direct heir to Baudelaire, and in his writings Kafū oftentimes proclaims his allegiance to the French poet, designating Les Fleurs du mal as his ‘gospel (fukuinsho)’ (Sasabuchi, 1976, p. 17). Baudelaire’s attacks on progress as the main reason for modern societies’ disregard of beauty had unfolded as early as 1855 in a violent essay on contemporary art. ‘The idea of progress (l’idée de progrès)’ is described as an ‘obscure beacon, invented by the present philosophism’, ‘a modern lantern [that] casts

1 「将来に於て日本の風景美が文明の「進化」の為めに惜し気もなく破壊されてしまつたなら、[...] 日本の国土に何が残るであろう。」On the essay from which this quote is taken, see Chapter 4-2. 2 「Démocratie と Positivisme の時勢は日一日に最後の美しい歴史的色彩を抹殺して、時代後れの詩人の夢を覚さねば止むまいとする。」

1 darkness on all objects of knowledge (ce fanal obscure, invention du philosophisme actuel, [...] cette lanterne moderne [qui] jette des ténèbres sur tous les objets de la connaissance)’ (Baudelaire, 1962, p. 217).3 With progress,

freedom vanishes [...]. This grotesque idea, which has flourished on the rotten terrain of modern fatuity, has discharged us all from our duty, has released every soul from its responsibility, has unburdened the will from all the bounds that the love of beauty had imposed on it; and the diminished races, if this dreadful madness endures, will fall asleep on the pillow of fatality in the dotard sleep of decay. This infatuation is the symptom of a decadence that is already too visible (Baudelaire, 1962, pp. 217-218).4

Believing in the idea of progress hinders men’s intellectual evolution, as they passively expect the objective movement of history to shape their destiny, thus surrendering their claim to a superior existential status transcending the blind laws of materiality. This is how ‘freedom’ comes from the awareness of men’s ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ as spiritual beings, the core value around which this superior human existence revolves being, according to Baudelaire, ‘the love of beauty’. This denunciation of progress is part of a wider reflection on modernity that Baudelaire develops in his essays on art. 5 For Baudelaire, ‘modernity is what is transitory, fleeting, contingent; it is half of what art is, the other half is the eternal and the immutable (la modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de

3 ‘Philosophism’ refers to the rationalist thought of the eighteenth century that led to nineteenth century positivism. Baudelaire consistently denounces the Enlightenment, writing for instance in Mon cœur mis à nu: ‘I am bored in France, especially because everyone there resembles Voltaire. [...] Voltaire, or the anti-poet, the king of the idle onlookers, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist [...]. Voltaire, like all lazy people, hated mystery (Je m’ennuie en France, surtout parce que tout le monde y ressemble à Voltaire. […] Voltaire, ou l’anti-poète, le roi des badauds, le prince des superficiels, l’anti-artiste […]. Voltaire, comme tous les paresseux, haïssait le mystère)’ (Mon cœur mis à nu, ch. 29). 4 ‘la liberté s’évanouit […]. Cette grotesque idée, qui a fleuri sur le terrain pourri de la fatuité moderne, a déchargé chacun de son devoir, délivré toute âme de sa responsabilité, dégagé la volonté de tous les liens que lui imposait l’amour du beau : et les races amoindries, si cette navrante folie dure longtemps, s’endormiront sur l’oreiller de la fatalité dans le sommeil radoteur de la décrépitude. Cette infatuation est le diagnostic d’une décadence déjà trop visible)’. Exposition universelle 1855, “Beaux-Arts”. 5 The French word modernité appeared precisely around that time. In 1853, Théophile Gautier wrote: ‘the character of English painting is, as we have said, modernity. Does this noun actually exist? The feeling it expresses is so recent that the word could well not be in the dictionary (le caractère de la peinture anglaise est, comme nous l’avons dit, la modernité. Le substantif existe-t-il ? Le sentiment qu’il exprime est si récent que le mot pourrait bien ne pas se trouver dans le dictionnaire)’ (Hobbs, 1998, p. 64).

2 l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable)’ (‘La Modernité’, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 1863; Baudelaire, 1962, p. 467). Baudelaire does not hold art from the past as inherently superior; on the contrary, true art is always innovative, as it strives to capture what has never been expressed before; the famous last line from the poem “Le Voyage” sums up this idea: ‘Plunge into the Unknown to find the new! (Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!)’ (Baudelaire, 1961, p. 160). However, because ‘all beauty contains [...] something eternal and something transitory — something absolute and particular (Toutes les beautés contiennent […] quelque chose d’éternel et quelque chose de transitoire — d’absolu et de particulier)’ (‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’, Salon de 1846, ch. 18; Baudelaire, 1962, p. 195), art which forsakes the ‘eternal’ and the ‘absolute’ is doomed to failure. Modern societies happen to be infatuated with constant motion, both physical — made possible by technical innovations — and spiritual — with this ‘dreadful madness’ that is the idea of progress. They are thus dangerously close to becoming impervious to beauty in its entirety. Kafū shared a similar critical viewpoint on Meiji Japan, and Sasabuchi Tomoichi highlights how for aesthetic reasons and ‘as a reaction against modernisation, Kafū adopted an anti-conformist posture (hanzoku-teki shisei) which made him deliberately seek out societies and areas that had maintained a conservative air. On this point, Kafū’s position is extremely close to Poe’s, Baudelaire’s, and Wilde’s’ (Sasabuchi, 1976, p. 56).6 These writers indeed have in common a complex positioning towards modernity that has been identified, concerning the French context, as anti-modern by Antoine Compagnon. As Compagnon argues, the creative spirit of an artist such as Baudelaire is ‘inseparable from the resistance against “the modern world” (inséparable de la résistance au « monde moderne »)’; Baudelaire is therefore the ‘prototype’ of these anti-modern writers who are also, at the same time, modern’ (Compagnon, 2005, p. 7). Anti-moderns are not tenants of classicism, academism, traditionalism, or conservatism (Compagnon, 2005, p. 18); on the contrary, they constitute the intellectual and artistic avant-garde specifically because they develop a complex,

6 「彼は [...] 近代化への反感から意識的に保守的な気風を残している社会や地域を求め、反俗的姿勢をとった。」 Stephen Snyder writes: ‘Kafū was, perhaps above all, a contrarian. Throughout his career, he took the cultural pulse of his burgeoning, metamorphosing nation and then did and said precisely the opposite’ (Snyder, 2000, p. 1).

3 critical reflection on modernity.7 ‘The anti-moderns [...] are the real moderns because they are not duped by modernity.8 The anti-modern within the modern appears as a demand for freedom (Les antimodernes [...] ne seraient autres que les modernes, les vrais modernes, non dupes du moderne. L’antimoderne dans le moderne, c’est l’exigence de liberté)’ (Compagnon, 2005, pp. 8-14); freedom not to abide by social norms, freedom not to believe in the dominant values of the times, and freedom to indulge in artistic and sensory pleasures wherever and whenever the artist may find them. This often pessimistic striving for intellectual freedom is what unites independent minds such as Kafū and Baudelaire. Capturing their aesthetical revolt against what they identify as the same features of the same modernity, affecting the industrialised world as a whole, allows for a much more complex understanding of intercultural interactions in the twentieth century. Much more than the one presumed by the often held assumption that, identifying modernity with a unilateral process of Westernisation, the critique of modernity and the critique of the West are the same. On the contrary, a shared genealogy of anti-modern critique applies to the Japanese variation of Decadent literature. Baudelaire indeed sees in progress the clearest sign of modernity as a global decadence.9 Decadence is the stage any civilisation reaches when its advanced state of evolution makes it put the idea of progress at the centre of its belief system; which also means that progress is both the product and the agent of decadence. As Mattei Calinescu puts it in his seminal study on Decadence, ‘progress and decadence imply each other so intimately that, if we were to generalize, we would reach the

7 Compagnon further notices that ‘the intellectual and literary history of the 19th and 20th centuries has always been reluctant towards the dogma of progress, has resisted rationalism, Cartesian thought, the Enlightenment, historical optimism — or determinism and positivism, materialism and mechanisation (l’aventure intellectuelle et littéraire des XIXe et XXe siècles a toujours bronché devant le dogme du progrès, résisté au rationalisme, au cartésianisme, aux Lumières, à l’optimisme historique — ou au déterminisme et au positivisme, au matérialisme et au mécanisme [...]’ (Compagnon, 2005, p. 11). 8 Baudelaire writes about Poe: ‘He has never been duped! — I do not believe that the Virginian who calmly wrote, amidst an outburst of democracy, “The people has nothing to do with laws except obey them”, has ever fallen victim to modern wisdom. (Car il ne fut jamais dupe ! — Je ne crois pas que le Virginien qui a tranquillement écrit, en plein débordement démocratique : « Le peuple n’a rien à faire avec les lois, si ce n’est de leur obéir », ait jamais été une victime de la sagesse moderne)’ (‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’; Baudelaire, 1962, p. 622). 9 As Compagnon writes, ‘after Baudelaire [...], mistrust of progress becomes a commonplace of anti- modernity (après Baudelaire [...], la méfiance à l’égard du progrès devient un lieu commun de l’antimodernité)’ (Compagnon, 2005, p. 61).

4 paradoxical conclusion that progress is decadence and, conversely, decadence is progress’ (Calinescu, 1977, p. 155).10 My approach to Decadence takes the paradoxes contained within the notion as its starting point, and I therefore subscribe to Charles Bernheimer’s outlook in his own study on the question: ‘It is not the referential content of the term that conveys its meaning so much as the dynamics of paradox and ambivalence that it sets in motion’ (Bernheimer, 2002, p. 5).11 The tenant of Decadence, being the one who believes that the society he lives in is in a state of decadence, is the one who articulates the concept and develops a suitable aesthetic for the times; this makes him the one accused of promoting decadence by those who do not partake in his pessimistic vision of history (Hustveldt, 1998, p. 10; Gilman, 1979, p. 158; Calinescu, 1977, p. 157). Replying to his critics, Baudelaire thus proudly concedes that he and his peers ‘are guilty of rejoicing in [their] destiny (nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre destinée)’, while boasting about the ability of ‘poetic minds’ such as themselves to ‘find new delights in the play of lights of this dying sun (Dans les jeux de ce soleil agonisant, certains esprits poétiques trouveront des délices nouvelles)’.

And the setting sun will indeed appear to them as the marvellous allegory of a soul heavy with life, which descents behind the horizon with a magnificent reserve of thoughts and dreams (Baudelaire, 1962, p. 620).12

Alongside Baudelaire, French Decadents in general constantly nourished this ambiguity. Verlaine extends the metaphor of the Decadent as a worshipper of a dying sun a couple of years later in his interview with Jules Huret in L’Écho de Paris (Stephan, 1974, p. 47):

We kept having this epithet [‘decadent’] thrown at us, like an insult; I picked it up as a war cry; but it did not mean anything specific, as far as I

10 In this study, I use the capitalised word ‘Decadence’ to refer to the literary aesthetic born in nineteenth century Europe; the un-capitalised word refers to the general idea of decay, degenerescence, and deterioration. 11 See also Calinescu quoting Jankélévitch: ‘Decadence is not in statu but in motu’ (Calinescu, 1977, p. 155). 12 ‘Et le coucher du soleil leur apparaîtra en effet comme la merveilleuse allégorie d’une âme chargée de vie, qui descend derrière l’horizon avec une magnifique provision de pensées et de rêves’. ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’.

5 know. Decadent! Is not the twilight of a beautiful day worth every dawn! And the sun that seems as though it is setting, will it not rise again tomorrow? (Huret, 1891, pp. 70-71)13

Verlaine’s declaration of decadence follows a characteristic double-movement: first angrily rejected and declared void, the adjective ‘decadent’ is then immediately infused with an aesthetic quality that applies to the poet’s own artistic sensitivity. Verlaine seems to imply that this overlapping refutation/affirmation comes from the inevitably cyclical nature of decadence; decadence is simultaneously an end and a beginning, and the poet, by accepting to be decadent himself, both invites and escapes decadence. When approaching this much-debated notion of literary and cultural history, one therefore needs to acknowledge this contradiction: the Decadent both denounces and embraces decadence.14 In this paradox lies the specificity of Decadence as a nineteenth century literary phenomenon. As Paul Bourget wrote in his famous 1881 essay on Baudelaire, ‘We delight in our so-called corruptions of style as well as in the refined beings of our race and our time (Nous nous délectons dans ce que vous appelez nos corruptions de style, et nous délections avec nous les raffinés de notre race et de notre heure)’ (Bourget, 1885, p. 28). The idea of decadence in general is indeed by no mean specific to the fin de siècle, nor to literature; in Europe, it had previously been articulated by numerous thinkers, from Polybius to Bossuet, Montesquieu, Vico, Rousseau, Gibbon... to name but a few (see Freund, 1984). However, for the first time in ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, the 1857 essay on his

13 ‘On nous l’avait jetée comme une insulte, cette épithète [de décadent] ; je l’ai ramassée comme un cri de guerre ; mais elle ne signifiait rien de spécial, que je sache. Décadent ! Est-ce que le crépuscule d’un beau jour ne vaut pas toutes les aurores ? Et puis, le soleil qui a l’air de se coucher, ne se lèvera-t- il pas demain ?’ 14 This fundamental semantic instability prompted the relative disgrace of the notion in literary criticism for most of the twentieth century. Richard Gilman famously wrote in 1979 in Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet that ‘there is nothing to which [decadence] actually and legitimately applies’, going as far as advocating the banishment of ‘this injured and vacant word from history’ (Gilman, 1979, p. 158). Recent research on Decadence adopts an opposite approach by putting this ambiguity at the centre of the debate.

6 translations of Poe, Baudelaire endows decadence with a new aesthetic content relevant to the contemporary context (Rasch, 1982, p. 207).15

Literature of decadence! — Empty words we often hear uttered, with the sonority of a pompous yawn, by these sphinxes without any riddle who watch the sacred doors of the Classical Aesthetic. Each time the irrefutable oracle resounds, one can be sure it is caused by a work more amusing than the Iliad. It obviously applies to a poem or a novel, the parts of which are all skillfully arranged to create surprise, the style of which is magnificently ornate, and where all the resources of language and prosody have been exploited by a flawless hand (Baudelaire, 1962, p. 619).16

The ‘style of decadence’ stands here for anti-academism in general; it applies to the artistic awareness of the avant-garde (Calinescu, 1977, p. 166). The style of decadence is suitable for any literature that engages fully with times that are decadent, rather than desperately clinging to a ‘classical aesthetic’ that has become obsolete. As Gautier writing about Baudelaire in 1868 expresses very clearly, decadence is thus forced upon the modern poet who refuses to turn a blind eye to modernity’s ills:

The poet of Les Fleurs du mal loved what is called improperly the style of decadence, which is nothing else but art arrived at this point of extreme maturity brought on by the oblique suns of aging civilisations. [...] [It] is

15 This essay on the ‘literature of decadence’, although ultimately a defence of Poe’s aesthetic (and, through Poe’s, of Baudelaire’s own), is mainly an answer to the anti-Romantic literary critic Armand de Pontmartin, who had attacked Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Alexandre Dumas, fils, for their ‘sick imagination’ (Vorhees, 2004, pp. 64-65). Pontmartin claimed that in any given civilisation, the classical style is always superior, as proven by Roman poetry; he was drawing his inspiration from Désiré Nisard’s 1834 study criticising the late Roman Empire’s literature, in which Nisard allegedly coins the phrase ‘style of decadence’ (Vorhees, 2004, p. 64; Rasch, 1982, pp. 6-7; Calinescu, 1977, pp. 157-158). 16 ‘Littérature de décadence ! — Paroles vides que nous entendons souvent tomber, avec la sonorité d’un bâillement emphatique, de la bouche de ces sphinx sans énigme qui veillent devant les portes saintes de l’Esthétique classique. A chaque fois que l’irréfutable oracle retentit, on peut affirmer qu’il s’agit d’un ouvrage plus amusant que l’Iliade. Il est évidemment question d’un poème ou d’un roman dont toutes les parties sont habilement disposées pour la surprise, dont le style magnifiquement orné, où toutes les ressources du langage et de la prosodie sont utilisées par une main impeccable.’ I do not entirely subscribe to Rasch’s interpretation of the Baudelairian usage of the word as ‘an objective term to describe a literature defined by its subject-matter, decay and dissolution’ (Rasch, 1982, p. 207); decadence is here clearly presented as an aesthetic, and, as I argue below, its application goes beyond the mere subject matter of ‘decay and dissolution’.

7 the necessary and fatal language of populations and civilisations for which artificial life has replaced natural life and has developed in men unknown urges. This style despised by the pedants is not an easy one, because it expresses new ideas through new forms and words that have never been heard before (Gautier, 1978, pp. 170-171).17

This rapid overview of the term’s usage shows that decadence was a debated topic in French literature several decades before the mid 1880s, when the magazine Le Décadent littéraire et artistique founded by Anatole Baju proclaimed Decadence to be the leading artistic movement of the time. This study thus builds on the work of the many scholars who have argued in favour of establishing a distinction within literary history between the short-lived and marginal movement started by Baju, strictly called decadism, and Decadence, which is understood as much further- reaching (Calinescu, 1977, pp. 175-177; Pierrot, 1981, p. 5; Weir, 1995, p. 7; Hustveldt, 1998, p. 13). Indeed, if decadism articulates decadence, so do Symbolism and Naturalism.18 Following David Weir, I argue that Decadence transcends literary movements; it is not a genre either, but rather an aesthetic category.

The various nineteenth century movements that proliferate in the period between romanticism and modernism (naturalism, symbolism,

17 ‘Le poëte [sic] des Fleurs du mal aimait ce qu’on appelle improprement le style de décadence, et qui n’est autre chose que l’art arrivé à ce point de maturité extrême que déterminent à leurs soleils obliques les civilisations qui vieillissent. [...] Tel est bien l’idiome nécessaire et fatal des peuples et des civilisations où la vie factice a remplacée la vie naturelle et développée chez l’homme des besoins inconnus. Ce n’est pas chose aisée, d’ailleurs, que ce style méprisé des pédants, car il exprime des idées neuves avec des formes nouvelles et des mots qu’on n’a pas entendus encore’. ‘Charles Baudelaire’.

8 Parnassianism, Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, décadisme, and others) can be understood if they are all seen as grounded in some concept of decadence [...]. Decadence is the common denominator underlying the extremely complex and diverse literary activities of the mid- to late nineteenth century [...] (Weir, 1995, pp. xvi-xvii).19

To this statement I would add that Decadence reaches beyond the European and American contexts within which it is usually confined. I further argue that Decadence, being essentially a relative phenomenon, is best understood when looked at from a comparative framework. The very idea of decadence is indeed cyclical in nature, relative in time to a past superior state, from which civilisation has fallen, and to a future inferior state, when the death of civilisation will lead to a pre-civilised starting point. This entails Decadence’s fascination for the other and the foreign, which can potentially represent either or both the past and the future of the Decadent. What academic studies on the topic thus tend to ignore is that Decadence, as a global phenomenon, not only reaches beyond genres and media but also becomes a key- concept for any culture confronted with the need to articulate a positioning towards modernity. The aim of this study is to capture Decadence in motion, by following the way the idea and the aesthetic travelled from France to Japan in the early twentieth century. The Japanese context is especially suited to an intercultural study of Decadence, not

18 Jean Moréas created the term ‘Symbolism’ in his article published on 18 September 1886 in Le Figaro littéraire; he explained later his motivations as follows: ‘I am the first who protested, as early as 1885, against the epithet decadent that was attached to us, and it is I who simultaneously claimed the one symbolist (C’est moi le premier qui ai protesté, dès 1885, contre l’épithète de décadents, dont on nous affublait, et c’est moi qui ai réclamé en même temps celle de symboliste)’ (Suzuki Keishi, 1986, p. 35). The term ‘Symbolism’ was therefore created to qualify with a different name the Decadent movement; Arthur Symons followed the same logic, abandoning the term decadent for Symbolism in 1893 (Creasy, 2014, pp. 12-14). In this study, I consider Symbolism as part of Decadence, following the lead of scholars such as Pierrot who argues that ‘the shift from decadence into symbolism that is seen as occurring around about 1886 was undoubtedly much less perceptible and much less radical in reality than is generally claimed’ (Pierrot, 1981, p. 5). In the case of Naturalism, ‘[it] should not be opposed bluntly to symbolism’, as Pierrot claims (Pierrot, 1981, p. 8). Naturalism shares with Decadence a fascination for determinism and general pessimism; ‘the difference is largely one of means rather than ends’ (Weir, 1995, p. 44); on the relationship between Decadence and Naturalism, see Chapter 2 of this study.

9 only because post-Meiji Japanese literature shows a strong awareness of the various French literary movements contributing to the Decadent aesthetic, but also because, as a rapidly industrialising nation competing on the geo-political level with Western powers, it acutely felt the need to address the question of modernity in general and of its own modernisation in particular. Moreover, my focus on the Japanese reception of French Decadence, despite Decadence being a global phenomenon touching all European literatures, is justified in part by practical limitations — so as to allow for in-depth analyses within a study of manageable scope — but also because, following Calinescu, I see in French literature the epicentre of the Decadent phenomenon.

The sense of decadence in the nineteenth century was certainly not restricted to France, but it was in that country, perhaps because of ‘the feeling that the nation’s power and prestige in the world were declining’, [K.W. Swart, 1964, p. xi] that the theme of decadence not only became more compelling and obsessive but also was charged with the intensely contradictory meanings that define, culturally, a typical love-hate relationship (Calinescu, 1987, pp. 161-162).

Indeed, in French literature especially — without minimizing the impact of works by Poe, Wilde, Swinburne, Pater, and D’Annunzio — the Decadent ambiguity flourishes. In my view, this is mainly due to Baudelaire’s unavoidable influence on French speaking writers from the 1850s onwards; Max Nordau was correct when, at the end of the century, he contemptuously named Decadence ‘the School of Baudelaire’ (Bechtel, Le Rider and Bourel, 1996, pp. 24-28). French Decadent writers can thus be divided, as Gérard Peylet has suggested, into a first generation and at least four subsequent generations who develop their art

19 Weir underlines the fact that Decadence as an aesthetic category springs from romanticism, as already highlighted in 1930 by Mario Praz in his classic study The Romantic Agony (English title, 1933). For Praz, Decadence ‘is wholly contained in romanticism and both are concrete historical forms of taste’ (Calinescu, 1987, p. 216). Rasch notices that Wilhelm von Humboldt was already writing in 1817 that ‘the history of the decline of states has for the most part a greater attraction than that of their period of glory, or rather, the latter only really becomes attractive when viewed from the perspective of the former’ (Rasch, 1982, p. 203). Beauty in decay is therefore a romantic idea.

10 under Baudelaire’s direct influence. 20 Alongside Baudelaire but more marginally, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, and Barbey d’Aurevilly, can be considered as the main founding figures of Decadence. The second generation, born in the 1840s, mainly centres on Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and includes others such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Next come writers and poets who are, in Peylet’s words, ‘born with Decadence’, that is to say in the 1850s (Peylet, 1994, p. 159), mainly Arthur Rimbaud — whose poetry about the crisis of representation hints at the main paradigms of modernism —, Rémy de Gourmont, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. The latter’s novel À rebours (1884) is called the ‘breviary of decadence’ by Arthur Symons in the 1908 version of his seminal book on Symbolism, which had a lasting impact on the reception of Decadence including in Japan.21 In the 1860s were born the next generation of Symbolists and, arguably, the fourth generation of Decadents, mainly Jules Laforgue, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Maurice Barrès. Finally, alongside Peylet, we may consider the last generation of Decadents to be constituted by writers who became crucial to the literature of the twentieth century, namely Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, André Gide, and Charles Péguy, to whom others, such as Paul Morand and Raymond Radiguet, may be added. This overview incidentally maps out the transition between romanticism and modernism that David Weir has identified as the most adequate definition of Decadence (Weir, 1995, pp. xvi-xvii). However, the above-mentioned list is by no means exhaustive. For instance, alongside Flaubert, proponents of a realist aesthetic such as Émile Zola also make use of Decadent elements. Identifying the core of Decadence is thus one of the many challenges born out of the elusive nature of the notion, aptly qualified by Weir as a ‘mystical sphere whose circumference is everywhere but whose center is nowhere’ (Weir, 1995, p. xix). This elusiveness is partly due to Decadence being the sometimes unconscious expression of the psyche of the times, which touches and affects artists and writers of

20 On the significance of Baudelaire’s influence, see Catherine Coquio: ‘“Your God Baudelaire”, writes Cazalis to Mallarmé in 1864. [...] “The first one”: the underlined, anaphoric formula that Laforgue uses in his “Notes” on Baudelaire. “The great master...” writes Huysmans in 1881. [...] “Your John the Baptist”, says Anatole France to Moréas — who has just crowned Baudelaire as the Decadents’ “direct father” and “true forerunner” of Symbolism. [...] Maeterlinck calls him in 1896 “the spiritual father of our generation”. (“Ton Dieu Baudelaire... ”, dit Cazalis à Mallarmé en 1864. [...] “Le premier” : formule soulignée, anaphorique, qui solennise les “Notes” télégraphiques de Laforgue sur Baudelaire. “Le grand maître... ” écrit Huysmans en 1881. [...] “Votre Baptiste”, dit Anatole France à Moréas — qui vient de sacrer Baudelaire “père direct” des décadents et “véritable précurseur” du symbolisme. [...] Maeterlinck l’appelle en 1896 le “père spirituel de notre génération”)’ (Coquio, 1993, pp. 91-92).

11 all creeds and styles. Decadence is the literary representation of the fin de siècle: the end of the century that, especially when expressed in French, means much more than a purely chronological statement (see Weber, 1986, p. 32). Decadence is indeed the product of a specific historical moment, when decades of triumphant positivism and scientism spread the consciousness of what Max Weber called disenchantment (Nye, 1982, pp. 110-112). A somewhat misinterpreted Darwinism spread the fear that the human race may at any moment reverse to its simian origins, contributing to the century’s obsession with physical degeneration, and leading to organicist and/or racist interpretations of decadence (Weir, 1995, pp. xii-xiii).22 ‘The feeling that [France]’s power and prestige in the world were declining’ mentioned by Calinescu in the quotation above can further be linked to a succession of historical events. As Compagnon analyses, Baudelaire’s mid-century anti- modernity is situated within a long history of reactions against rational thought and democratic ideals that crystallised during the French Revolution and through the Émigré culture that followed (Compagnon, 2005, p. 22). At the end of the century, the country was furthermore wounded in its identity by the catastrophic loss of Alsace- Lorraine to Prussia in 1870, and by the civil war-like siege of the Paris Commune. To this double trauma succeeded the financial crisis of 1884, the unrest linked with Boulangism in 1888-1889, and the Panama scandal. The antagonism between a ruling elite divided between a powerful bourgeoisie and a declining aristocracy — immortalised by Proust through Mme Verdurin and the duchesse de Guermantes — on the one hand, and an ever growing working class, on the other, made social tensions rife. The Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) arrived like salt on fresh wounds; no segment of French society escaped its repercussions, and ‘this deep rift, a rift that the high society jinks and goings-on of the Belle Epoque as the century ended may have masked but did not cure, continued to be felt in a more or less subterranean way until the outbreak of war in 1914’ (Pierrot, 1981, p. 3). The unprecedented scenes of barbarity the First World War entailed brought the final touch to the collapse of the unquestioning belief in progress. Paul Valéry’s declaration famously endorsed this fall from grace: ‘We civilisations, we now know that we are mortal (Nous autres,

21 See Chapter 1 of this study. 22 Max Nordau’s conflation of moral and physical decay in his Degeneration (English trans. 1895) is characteristic (Pick, 1996, pp. 48-53; S. Siegel, 1985, p. 200). On Decadence and racism, see Part 2 of this study.

12 civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles)’ (‘La Crise de l’esprit’, 1919; Valéry, 2016, p. 18). The First World War thus appeared as the confirmation of a European decline that was already feared during the nineteenth century. It is in 1918 that Oswald Spengler published the first volume of the influential The Decline of the West, but the idea that Europe had its golden age in the past was not new. Baudelaire writes in ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’,

The sun that, only a couple of hours ago, was flattening out all things with its white light will soon inundate the Western horizon with diverse colours. [...] [Poets] will discover there dazzling colonnades, waterfalls of melting metal, paradises of fire, a sad splendour, the delight of regret, all the magic of dreams, all the memories of opium (Baudelaire, 1962, p. 620).23

The West is where the sun sets, but this fact of nature has more than a metaphorical dimension. One of the reasons for this sense of decline paradoxically lies in the close encounters with the cultural other brought on by nineteenth century European imperialism and colonialism. Although it goes without saying that the consequences of colonialism affected first and foremost the populations on the receiving end of colonial violence, the dehumanisation of the other that the colonial enterprise entails does not leave the coloniser unchanged (see Memmi, 1965; Said, 2003; Fanon, 2005). The constant engagement with different cultures spreads an obsession with racial and cultural purity, as well as a fascination with the foreign and the hybrid on the European side (Affergan, 1987, p. 43; Queffélec, 1988, p. 362). Colonialism thus nourished the Decadent idea that a tired European civilisation was being threatened by younger, more energetic, and more populous alien cultures. Towards the end of the century, Asia especially was increasingly perceived as a threat to Western civilisation. In 1901 the French economist Edmond Théry coined the expression ‘Yellow Peril’; that Théry was actually referring to China in his infamous essay did not stop it from being attached to Japan as well (Wells and Wilson,

13 1999, p. 3). Japan being thus cast in the role of the up-coming world power, the historical context of Japanese Decadence may seem at first less subject to contemplations of imminent decay than the French. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 had created an entirely new state apparatus and the intellectual and artistic milieus were thriving under the massive import of foreign culture. The efforts of Meiji Japan to modernise seemed crowned with success when the newly industrialised Empire successively defeated not only the neighbouring giant that is China (1895), but also the white, Christian Empire of Russia (1905).24 Moreover, in the 1910s and 1920s, the regime showed an increased tolerance towards freedom of speech and political activism. Historian Shinobu Seizaburō subsequently coined in 1954 the expression ‘Taishō Democracy’ to describe the liberal atmosphere of the period. The expression is often contested, as Japan never established institutions that can be qualified as truly democratic until 1947 (Inoue Kiyoshi, 1969, pp. 9-13; Takemura, 2004, pp. 14-16), but it expresses the relative political openness, cosmopolitan spirit, and general optimism associated with the period (Harootunian, 1974, p. 22). The contrast between a spiritually exhausted France and a new, conquering Japan, was felt by Shimazaki Tōson in 1916; looking back on his time in Paris, he directly addressed the French capital as follows.

I sensed in you incommensurable ugliness, turbidity, and stagnation; if I had to say it in one word, the impression you made on me was cold; but despite it all, I cannot forget you. [...] I am eager to look afresh at the capital of my country through these eyes that have seen you. Whatever we may say, our country is still young (Kawamori, 1997, p. 247).25

23 ‘Ce soleil qui, il y a quelques heures, écrasait toutes choses de sa lumière blanche, va bientôt inonder l’horizon occidental de couleurs variées. […] [Certains poètes] y découvriront des colonnades éblouissantes, des cascades de métal fondu, des paradis de feu, une splendeur triste, la volupté du regret, toutes les magies du rêve, tous les souvenirs de l’opium’. 24 The historical significance of a Japanese victory over a white nation was internationally understood, and the war had been extensively covered by the foreign media (Wells and Wilson, 1999, p. 14). Upon hearing the news of the Japanese victory in Tsushima, President Roosevelt declared: ‘This is the greatest phenomenon the world has ever seen. Even the Battle of Trafalgar could not match this’ (Wells and Wilson, 1999, p. 23). 25「私はお前からかずかずの醜いもの、濁ったもの、澱んだもの、厭はしいものを感知したけれど、また一口に言って見ようならお前の印象は冷たかったけれども、それにもかかわらず私はお前を忘れることが出来ない。[...] 私はお前を見た眼で、もう一度自分の国の都を見直したいと思う。なんと言ってもわれわれの国はまだ若い。」‘Pari o hanareru ni atatte’ (When About to Leave Paris).

14 Tōson 26 seems to be implying that what he would bring back from France was actually the opposite of what the Japanese government was actively importing from the West: not cutting-edge science, military expertise, political reforms, and such, but a sense of belonging to a long, complex, and often distressing history. A similar observation was made by Kafū in his critique of Japanese modernity as blindly ‘monkeying’ the West without making the effort to link the present society with its past history (Sasabuchi, 1976, p. 56).27 These feelings sprang from the brutal rupture with Edo culture orchestrated by the government that prompted post-Meiji Japanese literature as a whole to be concerned with, as Seiji Lippit has remarked, ‘a sense of disconnection from a shared tradition as well as [...] an uncertainty regarding the boundaries of Japanese culture’ (Lippit, 2002, p. 3). However, I would argue that it is too simple to see in this identity crisis a localised phenomenon that can be entirely explained in terms of West vs. non-West, or in terms of support for Westernisation — and what it entails, mainly individualism — vs. reactionary traditionalism — meaning a return to a phantasmatic homogeneous native culture.28 As Decadence very well shows, modernity came with a sense of crisis in the French context as well; as a result, the Japanese writers sensitive to the Decadent message found in this foreign literature a way to articulate their sense of crisis while simultaneously staying true to the hybrid identity that gave birth to the crisis in the first place. This study’s comparative framework is indebted to world literature studies that place the circulation of concepts across disciplines and geographies at the centre of analysis (Damrosch, 2003; Apter, 2006) and advocate for a renewed emphasis on multilingual aesthetics (Pratt, 2003; Spivak, 2007). As David Damrosch puts it, ‘works of [...] literature take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to understand this new life we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts’ (Damrosch, 2003, p. 24).

26 In this study, I follow the Japanese custom of naming the authors by the personal name they chose from themselves: Tōson, Sōseki, Ōgai, Kafū, etc. 27 Seven years before Tōson, Kafū was also making the comment that ‘The West is extremely old- fashioned. It smells of history’ (Kichōsha no nikki; KZ, vol. 6, p. 193). 「西洋と云ふ処は非常に昔臭い国だ。歴史臭い国だ。」 28 Individualism means broadly the belief in men’s right to self-determination; in other words, according to an individualist outlook, men should be able to decide for themselves what they want to be, and not leave this choice up to a higher authority (be it class, caste, religion, social norms, etc.) Decadence can be understood as an elitist and anti-egalitarian individualism: individualism as a supreme value, but not for all. See Chapter 2-2 on individualism.

15 Emily Apter’s approach, while controversially critical, has the merit of questioning what translation can and cannot do; she therefore argues for the expansion of the field of translation studies ‘to include on the one hand, pragmatic, real world issues [...] and on the other, more conceptually abstract considerations such as the [...] multilingual experimentalism among historic avant-gardes’ (Apter, 2006, p. 4). Consequently, translation is understood in this study as necessarily more than a purely linguistic transfer; transmission and displacement entail inflected meanings according to the networks and contexts through which words circulate. Following the hypothesis that ‘transmissive means’ are also ‘transfigurative’ (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 2003, p. 392), translation is thus seen as both the agent and the object of such complex processes, which stretch over space, texts, and languages.29 This is why I place this study under the auspices of the phrase Baudelaire made famous, ‘Anywhere out of the world’. Baudelaire uses the expression in English to title his prose poem, which ends by a loose French translation of the title: ‘At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: “No matter where! No matter where! As long as it is out of this world!” (Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie : « N’importe où ! n’importe où ! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde ! »)’ (Baudelaire, 1969, p. 140). The English line is originally from Thomas Hood, but Baudelaire came across it as a quotation in Poe’s The Poetic Principle (S. Isaak, 2010, p. 6). Through this linguistic and textual hybridity, Baudelaire’s poem exhibits my point about the centrality of cultural displacement and aesthetic heterogeneity within Decadence. Furthermore, I choose a line from Baudelaire to clearly state the intellectual genealogy I intend to focus on in this study. I will present how, for the authors mentioned here — French and Japanese alike —, Baudelaire stands as the founding figure of Decadence, both for his symbolic status and the aesthetic developed in his poems and essays.30 Finally, the prose poem ‘Anywhere out of the world’ is relevant in the way it points towards escapism as one of the main paradigms of the Decadent literature I intend to focus on in this study. The short text describes a conversation between the poet and his soul. ‘It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I

29 This also implies that translation is not viewed as a ‘bridge between cultures’ as ‘translational transfer takes place between cultures that are already contaminated in themselves’ (Wolf 28). I therefore take the view that homogeneous national identities are ‘always already’ a retrospective re- construction (Anderson, 2006; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992). 30 See Chapter 1.

16 am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul (Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme)’ (Baudelaire, 1969, p. 139). Moving to far-away lands, described in a wealth of ornate details, appears as a potential solution. However, enjoying disorientation by traveling to exotic destinations can only be a stopgap measure for the soul’s existential malaise. Soon the feeling of unfamiliarity fades and the poet is confronted again with the universal angst that any sensitive man carries with him, in a world that has succumbed to the tyranny of progress and efficiency over the delights of beauty and pleasure. According to this pessimistic vision of human existence, the only possible compromise is to try and keep aloof from laws of nature and society alike, and create derivative enjoyments through art mainly, but also drugs and an abnormal sexuality. The Decadent thus takes refuge in a paradis artificiel that provides him with the sophisticated sensory and aesthetic experiences he needs. Compagnon identifies as a defining trait of anti-modernity this inability and/or unwillingness to commit either to a given geographical location or to the social and ideological norms that rule it. ‘Any anti-modern will always be an inner emigrant, or a cosmopolitan reticent to identify to the national sentiment. He is relentlessly fleeing a hostile world, just like Chateaubriand, the inventor of the I do not feel well anywhere (Tout antimoderne restera un émigré de l’intérieur ou un cosmopolite réticent à s’identifier au sentiment national. Il fuit sans relâche un monde hostile, comme Chateaubriand, l’inventeur du Je ne suis bien nulle part)’ (Compagnon, 2005, p. 22). I propose to theorise the way this desire for escape is articulated within Decadent literature through the concept of paratopia developed by Dominique Maingueneau. Maingueneau indeed argues that it is intrinsic to literary discourse to locate its own legitimacy within ‘a paradoxical location, paratopia, which is not the absence of space but a difficult negotiation between space and non-space, a parasitic location which lives on its very own impossibility to stabilize. (Localité paradoxale, paratopie, qui n’est pas l’absence de tout lieu, mais une difficile négociation entre le lieu et le non-lieu, une localisation parasitaire, qui vit de l’impossibilité même de se stabiliser)’ (Maingueneau, 2004, pp. 52-53). It is thus the essence of literature to always maintain an ambiguous relationship with the society it is a product of. Indeed, ‘without localisation, there is no institution able to legitimise and manage the

17 production and consumption of [literary] works, but without de-localisation, there is no true constituency. (Sans localisation, il n’y a pas d’institutions permettant de légitimer et de gérer la production et la consommation des œuvres, mais sans dé- localisation, il n’y a pas de constituance véritable)’ (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 52).31 The paratopic location of literary discourse accounts for its obsession with exoticism and adventures as well as anti-social and/or out of the ordinary characters, at least since romanticism put forward the myth of the cursed genius who does not abide by the usual laws of conduct (Brissette, 2005, pp. 283-301). The notion of paratopia furthermore allows us to link the European fascination with the non- Western or hybrid other within Decadence to the Japanese quest for a new, displaced identity. According to Maingueneau, ‘paratopia removes from a group (paratopia of identity), from a space (spatial paratopia), or from a moment (temporal paratopia). (la paratopie écarte d’un groupe (paratopie d’identité), d’un lieu (paratopie spatiale) ou d’un moment (paratopie temporelle)’ (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 86). This study analyses each of this different types of paratopia within Japanese Decadent literature through first, in Part One, the emergence of a specific literary milieu translating French Decadence into the Japanese context; then, in Part Two, the shared fascination for the foreign and the hybrid within French and Japanese Decadence. This study thus combines Maingueneau’s discourse analysis approach with the translation studies and world literature studies mentioned above in order to highlight the way in which cultural displacement plays a central role within Decadent literature. Such a topic quite clearly invites a reflection on post-colonial critique of cultural interactions and this point is taken into account. It can indeed be argued, and it has been done by several scholars, that Japan has been since Meiji in a ‘pseudo-colonial’

31 As summed up by Julia Öri, ‘as with other discourses, [literary discourse] is part of the social space from which it emerges. The production and reception of works are conditioned by their social, geographical, and temporal contexts as well as by institutions such as schools and journals. However, literature is intended to be distinguished from “profane” texts and to be considered as “discourse- origin”, namely, a discourse with authority to legitimize itself and other discourses. That is why at the same time it has to deny it belongs to society and so present itself as independent from institutions’ (Öri, 2015, p. 85). Discourse-origin, or discours constituants, is a discourse that finds its legitimacy within itself. ‘He who enounces within a discourse-origin cannot be located either outside or inside society; he is condemned to nourish his work with the radically problematic characteristic of his belonging to society. (Celui qui énonce à l’intérieur d’un discours constituant ne peut se placer ni à l’extérieur ni à l’intérieur de la société : il est voué à nourrir son œuvre du caractère radicalement problématique de sa propre appartenance à cette société)’ (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 52). Literature is a discourse-origin as it ‘builds the conditions of its own legitimacy by proposing a universe of meaning, and more generally by constructing sensory categories for a possible world. (construit les conditions de sa propre légitimité en proposant un univers de sens, et plus généralement en offrant des catégories sensibles pour un monde possible)’ (Cossutta, 2004, p. 419).

18 situation (Amano, 2013, p. 2)32; the complex position of Japan within the political dynamics in the first half of the twentieth century as identified by post-colonialism is analysed in Chapter 3. However, looking at French literary influences on Japanese literature in terms of oppression and cultural submissiveness would not allow for the complex picture of translation as re-creation that I see in the Japanese Decadent phenomenon. This is also the reason why I only marginally rely on Pascale Casanova (2004)’s study on the aura of France within the twentieth century literary field, as her focus on the political hierarchisation of cultural products fails to leave much room for less strictly top-down vision of cultural exchanges. I rely heavily on research that focuses on the linguistic and literary manifestations of the Japanese reception of French literature, such as those of Yamada Toyoko (2015) and Miura Nobutaka (2004), and on the abundant Japanese monographs on individual writers; Noda Utarō (1976)’s impressive study on Japanese Aestheticism, hardly ever mentioned in Western research, is largely quoted here. This study intends to fill a gap within research on Decadent literature, as I believe that, in Western and Japanese academia alike, a systematic comparative approach of the phenomenon is still missing. In Japan, several scholars have analysed individual writers through the lens of fin de siècle aesthetic (Komori Yōichi, 1999, and Sadoya Shigenobu, 1982, on Sōseki; Matsumura Masaie, 2002, on Tanizaki; Sasabuchi Tomoichi, 1976, on Kafū); however, despite the quality of these studies, they lack the outlook on Decadence as a global phenomenon that I deem important in order to understand it properly. The Japanese research that focuses on the notion of Decadence itself is scarce and mainly represented by Karaki Junzō (1966), whose definition remains extremely loose and ultimately inconclusive, and whose analyses, on top of lacking historical contextualisation, fail to pay rigorous attention to the text. When it comes to research on Decadence in English and French, this tends to completely ignore non-Western literatures, except for a few notable exceptions that do not concern the Japanese case (Galik, 2005) To my knowledge, Ikuho Amano’s Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan is the only study dedicated to the topic. One would hope that this recent work, published in 2013, marks a newly found awareness of a gap within literary research

32 Japanese academia also displays a strong investment in studies on cultural and geographical margins, hybridity, literature of exile, extraterritoriality, etc. (Imafuku Ryūta, 2001; Numano Mitsuyoshi, 2002; Nishi Masahiko, 2008). However, I find that this research rarely takes as its object Japan itself.

19 that needs to be filled. Amano chooses to focus on different aspects of decadence through specific literary works scattered from the Meiji era to 2005. Her overview of the genealogy of Japanese Decadent literature as presented in the Introduction covers many centuries as it starts in the Heian period. It seems to me that because of these characteristics, Amano’s study suffers from its ambitious scope and as a result provides for a very loose definition of decadence — and it seems indeed that Amano does not seek to outline the specificities of Decadence as a phenomenon originating in fin de siècle Europe. I therefore rely on some of Amano’s analyses that concern the time frame I focus on, while trying to provide for an alternative vision of Japanese Decadence centered on its interactions with French texts. My own study starts in the second half of the 1890s as debates surrounding French Decadent literature started to arise in the Japanese literary world. The Japanese military victory over China in 1895 marked the country’s symbolic entry into modernity. The successful Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905 brought confirmation to this new status, and the victory over Russia created the conditions for the political and intellectual atmosphere that would later lead to ‘Taishō Democracy’. In 1905, Ueda Bin published his collection of translated poems Kaichōon (The Sounds of the Tide), which would have a lasting impact in introducing French Symbolism to Japanese literary milieus. A couple of years later, in 1908, there appeared Kafū’s Furansu monogatari (French Stories), written after his sojourn abroad, in which he develops his own understanding of French literature, French modernity, and his predicament as a Japanese Decadent. The same year Pan no kai (the Circle of Pan), the group of artists and poets forming the core of Japanese Aestheticism, was established. By 1916, when critic Akagi Kōhei denounced what he saw as the vulgarity of a literature promoting indulgence and selfish pleasures (Amano, 2013, pp. 7-8), French Decadence had been translated and adopted by some of the most prominent writers of the times, such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who had appeared on the literary scene in 1910 with the inflammatory sadomasochistic and unapologetically Decadent short story Shisei (The Tattooer). Nevertheless, around the mid-1910s, the golden age of Japanese Decadence seems to come to a halt. In 1910-1911, the High Treason Incident (taigyaku jiken) heightened repression against liberal-minded artists and intellectuals, and the Decadent writers infatuated with France were the first to pay the price of an increasingly inward looking official ideology. It was also in 1916 that

20 Kafū, retiring from both his French literature teaching position at Keiō University and as an editor of Mita bungaku, the literary magazine that played a central role in introducing Decadence to Japan, started his long withdrawal from the world (Seidensticker, 1965, pp. 81-82; Snyder, 2000, p. 54). With authors such as Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Sakaguchi Ango, or Murakami Ryū, one could argue that the entirety of twentieth century Japanese literature could be analysed through the prism of Decadence, and this is a testimony to the aesthetic’s enduring powers of seduction. However, for the purpose of this study’s focus on the Japanese reception of French fin de siècle Decadence, I end my analysis in the mid-1920s. In the 1920s indeed, the Proletarian movement, the aesthetic of which is at the opposite pole to Decadence, played an important role in the literary avant-garde. In a famous 1928 article titled ‘The Road to Proletarian Realism’, Kurahara Korehito attacked elitist Aestheticism and ‘idealist art (idearizumu no geijutsu)’ in general for its total disregard for the class struggle (see Karlsson, 2008, pp. 252-256). Watanabe Kazutami thus argues that in the 1920s and early 1930s, with Marxism becoming the main outlet for the intellectual milieus to express their aspiration for freedom, the dominant cultural references for non-conformist writers and artists shifted from France to the Soviet Union (Watanabe, 2003, p. 23). In 1923- 1924, along with the great changes brought on by the Kantō earthquake, a wave of new French translations appeared, presenting in particular Gide and Morand to the Japanese public. Morand’s translator, Horiguchi Daigaku, walked in the steps of great Francophile aesthetes such as Ueda Bin and introduced a number of new French poets and writers such as Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Radiguet. I choose his collection of translated French poetry, Gekka no ichigun (A Crowd Under the Moon, 1925), to mark the chronological endpoint of this study. This study starts with a reflection on the practice of translation as a form of creative art, highlighting the major roles played by literary magazines such as Myōjō, Subaru, and Mita bungaku. In Chapter One, I first focus on Ueda Bin’s understanding of Symbolism and the reception of Baudelaire in Japan. From these founding texts, I analyse how Decadence was translated into Japanese, from the first theoretical essays and articles on the question. In Chapter Two, I present the organisation of the Decadent milieus from 1905 to 1915 around the key issues of Naturalism, Aestheticism, and nostalgia for pre-Meiji Japan, focusing on Kafū’s recreation of an explicitly phantasmagorical Edo. I analyse the Decadent perception of the

21 relationships between art, life, and subjectivity, focusing on the significance of hedonism, dandyism, and individual friendship within the Decadent life view. I argue that Edo seen through Kafū’s eyes becomes the incarnation of the paratopic space from which the Decadent writer could express his anti-modern stance Part Two deals with the imaginary of the exile within Decadence, in geographical, existential, and chronological terms. In Chapter 3, I analyse the Decadent as an eternal exiled, including in his native land. I present how and why linguistic hybridity constituted a crucial part of the Japanese Decadent aesthetic mainly through the poetry of the Circle of Pan. I focus on notions such as internal exile, cosmopolitanism, and exoticism, by drawing their common genealogy from Arthur de Gobineau to Paul Morand. In the following chapter, I pursue the reflection on the foreign by highlighting the ambivalent position of Japan within European orientalism and of Japanese writers towards European orientalist literature. I analyse the significance of Japonism within French Decadence and its reception among the Japanese Decadents. The chapter ends with a focus on Pierre Loti as a Decadent writer, his reception in Japan, and the role he plays within Kafū’s own articulation of anti-modern themes.

22 PART ONE THE DECADENT MILIEU

The first time Baudelaire’s name appeared in a Japanese text is supposed to have been in 1890, in Mori Ōgai’s Umoregi (Fossil Wood)33 (Yano, 1976, p. 60): ‘One day, Gesa asked Sterny: “What is a chimère [chimera]?” Gesa was reading before lunch the Frenchman Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, without really understanding it’ (OZ, vol. 1, p. 539).34 Whether Ōgai is to be considered the author of this quote depends on the status translation and authorship hold within the reader’s culture, as Umoregi is not an original creation. It is translated from Die Geschichte eines Genies (The Story of a Genius, 1884), a novel by the Austrian writer Ossip Schubin (pseudonym of Aloisia Kirschner, 1854-1935), an extravagant story of cursed genius and dangerous virtuosity.35 The father figure of Decadence thus arrived in Japan via a detour through German, and rather than being represented by his own writings, he is only mentioned in passing as part of a discussion between two fictional characters. I start with this detail to underline how much Decadence’s journey from France to Japan cannot by any means be seen as a straightforward one. Following its trajectory first and foremost highlights the urgency within contemporary academia to articulate in more detail and from more diverse cultural materials the ‘critique of the figure of the translator as an assembler of linguistic equivalences obtained from a dictionary, which, seemingly out of fashion, is still very strongly perceived in technical translation and is part of the commonsensical view of translational practices’ (Loffredo and Perteghella, 2006, p. 7). Major scholars specialising in translation studies, such as Lawrence Venuti or Susan Bassnett, have undertaken the task, but their approach remains centred on Western translation cultures.

33 Umoregi was published in nineteen instalments, from 1890 to 1892, in the magazine Shigarami sōshi. The passage about Baudelaire appears in volume 15, December 1890. 34 「或る日ゲザは「『シメエル』とは奈なる物ぞ、」とステルニイに問ひかけぬ。この昼前の事にて、佛人ボオドレエルが著したる「悪の花」といふ書を、解せぬながら翻へし居たるゲザが口より出でし問なりき。」Umoregi’s two main characters are the composer Alphonse de Sterny and the violinist Gesa von Zuylen.

23 In The Translator as Writer, Susan Bassnett argues for a much-needed re- evaluation of the task of the translator, while denouncing a strict hierarchisation between the writer and the translator:

Some writers are lionized and critics write endlessly about their achievements, but no matter how productive they may be, translators are generally ignored, they are invisible beings whose literary skills are obliterated by the reputation of the writer whose work they translate (‘Writing and Translating’; Bassnett, 2006, p. 173).

One cannot but notice how little this applies to the context of early twentieth century Japan. The names of Mori Ōgai, Nagai Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, stand tall next to giants such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. Within Japanese Decadence, translators are authors, for at least two reasons. First because all translators practiced creative writing, including those better known today for their translations, such as Ueda Bin and Horiguchi Daigaku. Secondly, their translations were never received at the time as un-original, and considering them today as belonging to a lesser category than their creative writings would have seemed nonsense. In this respect, Susan Bassnett’s argument resonates strongly:

One of the difficulties we have today in assessing the work of countless writers is that uncomfortable distinction between writing and translating, which starts to break down once it is scrutinized closely. [...] It is absurd to see translation as anything other than a creative literary activity, for translators are all the time engaging with texts first as readers and then as rewriters, as recreators of that text in another language (Bassnett, 2006, pp. 174-175).

The term ‘creative writing’ itself, used here for the sake of clarity, is thus inappropriate to mark a distinction between translation and other forms of writing, as translation is necessarily creative. Baudelaire, as a translator of Poe, saw little

35 Die Geschichte eines Genies narrates the story of the musical genius Sterny who presents to the world a piece aptly called ‘Oratoria of Satan’; his violinist is the mysterious and beautiful Gesa who is

24 distinction between his creative writing and translation: ‘Charles Baudelaire became so immersed in Poe’s writing, theories and style that it became difficult even for him to pinpoint where Poe’s identity differed from his own: “The first time I opened a book from [Poe], I not only saw [...] topics I had dreamed of but also sentences thought by me and written by him twenty years earlier (La première fois que j’ai ouvert un livre de lui, j’ai vu [...] non seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des phrases pensées par moi et écrites par lui vingt ans auparavant)’ (S. Isaak, 2010, p. 1). John Wixted underlines in his study of Ōgai’s translations how much translation and creation are intertwined in the case of modern Japanese literature:

These texts prompted creative analogues [...], creative adaptations [...], and other creative writing [...], which in turn helped occasion much of the best in modern Japanese literature. Recovering these lost traces by examining the other two stages in the process of literary influence — the original sources of inspiration and the works into which they were recast — enriches understanding of all three stages and of all of the works concerned. Translation, as illustrated by Ōgai, can transform readers’ linguistic, literary, and lived worlds (Wixted, 2009, p. 109).

Modern Japanese literature is indeed the perfect locus to start putting into question the very nature and function of translation. Firstly, the term ‘translation’ covers an array of texts entertaining very different degrees of resemblance to the source text. Drawing a line between translation, adaptation, and re-writing, especially concerning texts from the Meiji era, is a difficult if not impossible task, and Wixted rightly claims that ‘between translations and so-called creative writing stands a vast middle ground, one

supposed to be a gypsy of unclear origins. If not directly Decadent, the novel is representative of the post-romantic aesthetic.

25 especially important in modern Japanese literature [...]. What we really need is a taxonomy of adaptation’ (Wixted, 2009, p. 104).36 Furthermore, the example of Umoregi shows clearly that translation can be considered a form of literary criticism, as already argued by Marilyn Gaddis Rose (Gaddis Rose, 1997, p. 13). Someone like Ōgai indeed never practiced translation as a blind transcription of the source material. This appears in the extract quoted above, as the metaphor of the chimera was made famous by Baudelaire in a prose poem called ‘Chacun sa chimère’, which is not part of Les Fleurs du mal, contrary to what seems to be implied in Schubin’s text. Ōgai, who provided commentary with his translations, identified this correctly, and wrote in the last instalment of Umoregi (April 1892):

In Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose (Small Prose Poems), there are three people who, exhausted and about to fall, are carrying on their back a ‘chimère’ (a delusion in the form of a woman who is seeking immortality). The ‘chimère’ sinks her nails in people’s shoulders and lacerates their flesh (Yano, 1976, pp. 60-61).37

This shows that Ōgai had a good knowledge of Baudelaire’s works. Whether he read Baudelaire directly (either in French or in translation) at this point is unknown, but Yano Hōjin underlines how Baudelaire’s prose poems were chosen by Lafcadio Hearn as the topic for a series of lectures given at Tokyo Imperial University at an unknown date, but ‘at least before 1902’ (Yano, 1976, p. 64); Hearn’s correspondence shows that he had a good knowledge of Baudelaire’s writings in their original French version from the 1870s onward (Yano, 1976, pp. 64-65).

36 Thus, as J. Scott Miller has analysed, considering hon’an or adaptation as a primitive form of translation would be incorrect: ‘This deference towards hon’anmono was not, I suggest, due to an incomplete concept of literal translation; nor was it simply a matter of linguistic incompetence. [...] Rather, Meiji writers appear to have seen hon’anmono as a valid, alternative genre to literal translations (hon’yaku), and valued the creative liberty and critical forum hon’an provided’ (Miller, 2001, p. 4). Furthermore, domestication does not automatically equal incomplete or inferior rendering of the source text. As Ōtsuka Yukio shows, one of the most faithful early translations from French is Osada Shūtō’s La Dame aux camélias (1903), where the main characters are called Gotō Tsuyuko (for Marguerite Gautier) and Arima Jutarō (for Armand Duval) (Ōtsuka, 1974, p. 11). See also Inoue Ken (Inoue K., 2011, pp. 1-2; pp. 57-59). プチイ・ポエム・アン・プローズ 37 「ボオドレエルが作りし散文小詩といふものに、疲れ果てて倒れむとしたる三人の、おのおの背の上におそろしき「シメエル」（女性の形したる不朽を謀らむとする妄想）を負ひたるあり。「シメエル」は鋭き爪を人々の肩先きに立てて、その肉を掻き破らむとしたり。」

26 This indirect transmission of knowledge shows how much the personal and institutional relationships between the diverse actors of the literary world play a role in developing and domesticating new ideas and styles. In the case of the Decadent aesthetics, this is all the more true as Decadence is understood as entailing both a literary practice and a lifestyle. Subsequently, I present and analyse in the following two chapters the ways Decadence was translated into the Japanese context through networks of people (writers, poets, translators, editors... one person often being all the above at once) and texts (volumes, anthologies, articles, etc.) In Chapter One, I will focus on the role the introduction of Symbolism played within Japanese Decadence, especially through the translations and articles of Ueda Bin (1874-1916). I will present the translation culture within which these texts are embedded, and analyse the exact wording referring to Decadence at the end of the chapter, paying close attention to the chronology of the first usages of this specific terminology. In Chapter Two I will argue in favour of a re-evaluation of the anti- Naturalist interpretation of Decadence and follow how the main actors of the Japanese Decadent movement, Nagai Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and the poets of the Circle of Pan articulated their theory and practice of Aestheticism.

27 CHAPTER ONE Translation as a Creative Art. The Language of Decadence

‘Translation is art. Its purpose is not to serve as a guidebook (Hon’yaku wa bungei de aru. ‘hitori an’nai’ dewanai)’ (UBZ, vol. 7, p. 593). 38 In two short sentences, Ueda Bin sketches a very clear picture of what he means by ‘translation (hon’yaku)’. He sees as crucial that a translation should be able to stand alone as a complete work of literature. In other words, the final translated text should not be dependent on the source text in any way: the understandability as well as the aesthetic legitimacy should be entirely found in the target text. Aside from entailing a complex negotiation of shared authorship with the translator, this approach to translation radically challenges a vision of Meiji as a time when Japanese intellectuals are entirely concerned with learning about the West and importing as much as possible this newly discovered knowledge. Ueda Bin states it very clearly: the primary aim of his translations is not to enlighten readers about any other texts than the one they are holding in their hand. In the same essay, Bin gives the following explanation about his motivations as a translator:

The language of Meiji needs to be more refined and elaborated, to be sure. In other words, it needs ‘polishing’ [...]. This is why, as I have been striving these last years to revive the Japanese language, I have attempted to translate foreign literature, and even texts that were completely different, into a high style of elegant refinement [gabun](UBZ, vol. 7, p. 591).39

The main elements of Bin’s translation practice that I intend to present here are clearly laid out. First, his practice is embedded within the larger context of the deep

38 「翻訳は文芸である。「独案内」ではない。」「小生の翻訳」Bungei refers to both literature and art. Hitori an’nai is a term from the late Edo period referring to a guidebook, meant to be used by people travelling on their own (the equivalent of our Lonely Planet?). 39 「どう考へても明治の国語には一應の洗練彫琢が必要だ。いはゆる「磨き」をかけねばならぬ [...]。小生が先年日本語の復活に勉めたとき、雅文めきて、実は全くさうでない一種の文体に外国文学を翻訳してみたのは、上の目的に関する一種の試みであった。」

28 linguistic renewal that marks Meiji literature (Lee Yeounsuk, 2010, pp. 21-70); second, it shows a conscious and systematic choice of taking liberties with the source text; finally, it deliberately focuses on elaborating a sophisticated and lofty literary style.40 I will show in the second part of the chapter how this translation practice makes sense within the context of translating Decadence, focusing on the exact terminologies used by Bin and others to introduce Decadent literature to the Japanese audience.

1. Introducing Symbolism: Ueda Bin’s Linguistic Revolution

The role of Futabatei Shimei’s translations from Russian in radically modernising the Japanese language is well known (Cockerill, 2014; Keene, 1984; Levy, 2010). In the years 1887-1889, Shimei produced an array of texts that would come down in history as marking the effective starting point of the genbun itchi phenomenon, the unification of the spoken and written language. The crucial role of translation in transforming Japanese is illustrated by the fact that it is arguably less his novel Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1887-1889) than his translation from Turgenev, Aibiki (Secret Meeting, 1888), that ‘had the most influence as a style of writing embodying the ideal of genbun itchi’ (Tomasi, 2014, p. 151). The poet Kanbara Ariake, disciple of D. G. Rossetti and Mallarmé, and author of obscure, intricately elaborate poetic works (Keene, 1984, pp. 229-239), writes as follows about the shock he received while reading Aibiki as a young man:

As I was reading, I had the feeling that someone was talking to my ear, as if in person, without pausing, in a long unbroken murmur. [...] I enjoyed with my whole body this musicality, which was for me a unique stimulation, something that at the time I had never experienced before. I kept reading it over and over again (Yamada, 2015, p. 17).41

40 The term gabun used by Bin to qualify this style has a long history within Japanese poetry. It means in general ‘elegant’ and ‘artistic’, and ‘certain kinds [of style/text] can be described at different moments [in history] as taken to be ga in status [...]’. When opposed to zoku, ‘the polar terms more or less divided various kinds of literature into the true (or official) on the one hand and the common (or not worth considering) on the other. [...] What was once thought zoku might come to be thought true art [with time]’ (Miner, Odagiri, and Morrell, 1988, p. 274). 41「読みゆくまゝに、わたくしの耳のそばで親しく、絶間なく、綿々として、さゝやいてゐるやうに感じられた [...]。兎にも角にも、わたくしの覚えたこの一篇の刺激は、全身的で、音楽的で、また当時にあってはユニクのものでもあった。それで幾度も繰返して読んだ。」Hiunshō 飛雲抄 (1938).

29 The newness of Shimei’s text came from the way it mimicked spoken language; it was the first time for Ariake to experience reading as an intimate conversation between himself and the author. However, Futabatei Shimei was by no means the only writer whose translations were breathing new life into Japanese literature. Mori Ōgai’s approach was different but equally stimulating for his fellow writers. In his famous account of the literary world Tōkyō no sanjūnen (Thirty Years in Tokyo 1917), Tayama Katai recalls:

Indeed, it wasn’t just young literary aspirants, but established writers as well who liked to read [Ōgai]. Translations of his, like ‘Fossil Wood’ [Umoregi] and ‘The Impromptu Poet’ [Sokkyō shijin, 1902], stimulated enormous change in the literary world (Tayama, 1981, p. 87).42

Sokkyō shijin in particular is an ‘adaptation of the novel by Hans Christian Andersen, Improvisatoren (1835), beautifully cast in gabun-style Japanese replete with classical phrasing, lush diction, and entire passages in sōrōbun [traditional epistolary style]’ (Wixted, 2009, p. 61). The main specificity of Ōgai’s translations is indeed to be found in the re- exploration of traditional Japanese styles applied to foreign materials. In this sense, he chose an opposite approach to Futabatei Shimei’s and the other adherents to the genbun itchi: his aim was to create a literary language suitable to express new ideas and new aesthetics.43 While the former developed what is called the kōgo style, the written form of the colloquial, spoken Japanese, Ōgai practiced the bungo (literary) style, and he did so in his translations as well as in his fictions, such as Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890) and Utakata no ki (Foam on the Waves, 1890), which equally struck the audience for the beauty of their language and the newness of their foreign themes and settings.

42 「文学青年ばかりではない。多少既に名を出した作家でも、皆な [鷗外] を愛読した。『埋木』『即興詩人』の翻訳がどんなに文壇的革命を促す材料となったか知れなかったのであった。」Translation by Kenneth Henshall (Tayama, 1987, p. 105). 43 This is not to say that Ōgai did not practice the genbun itchi style himself, as for instance his 1912 translation of Goethe’s Faust shows. Wixted reckons that this translation was written in response to Futabatei Shimei and Tsubouchi Shōyō (Wixted, 2009, p. 102).

30 Ōgai’s style in the 1890s and first years of the 1900s thus came to be known as bibun, literally ‘beautiful text’. It is described as follows by the Hinatsu Kōnosuke, the main representative of Gothic poetry in Japan:

A prose form widely practiced in the Meiji 30s, applying the old gabun style’s patina to totally exotic materials. [...] The readers of the time had no choice but to get intoxicated and raptured by the exquisite beauty of Ōgai literature, which seemed at once old and new (Hinatsu, 1953, p. 37).44

Ōgai’s style had an immense influence on Japanese literature of the turn of the century (Fujisawa, 1997).45 The writers and poets who participated in the constitution of Japanese Decadence clearly follow in Ōgai’s footsteps when it comes to their approach to language. The Decadent aesthetic seeks indeed to re-create through the artificial means provided by art a reality tolerable enough to the hypersensitive poet/artist. Its usage of language is thus fundamentally literary/ artistic, as language’s main function is not to reflect the world — deemed ugly and vulgar —, but to re- create an alternative space wherein the poet/artist can find the beauty the real world has forsaken. Yamada Toyoko’s description of bibun fits just such an approach to language: ‘Ōgai’s bibun established a distance with the common reality through its usage of the literary style [bungo], and extolled something that was superior in beauty to the real. It was its very ‘archaism’ that was the origin of a new style’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 19).46

44「エキゾティックそのものの題材を古色蒼然たる雅文体に盛った、較やひろい意味での三十年代に大に行はれた美文といふ散文形式 [...]。当世の読者子は、この古きが如く新らしきが如き鷗外文学の妙趣に恍惚と酔ふ外はなかった。」「明治浪曼文学史」John Wixted describes this style which is ‘at once old and new’ as follows: ‘There are more modern elements in Sokkyō shijin than at first meet the eye: Bildungsroman themes (like self-development through love), written expression influenced by Western-language usage, and a richly otherworld New World vocabulary. These are harmonized with the obviously atavistic features of the work: intense use of bungo constructions, recherché diction, and an old fashioned tone. The result makes for a remarkable balance’ (Wixted, 2009, p. 85). 45 The influential volume of poetry by Shimazaki Tōson Wakana shū (Seedlings, 1897) is one of the most significant products of this influence. As Orikuchi Shinobu writes, ‘Tōson’s work shaped up a style that adapts the melancholy of kogo [classical language] to the sensitivity of the modern man’ (「藤村の事業は、古語が含んでいる憂いと、近代人のもつ感覚とを以て、まず文体を形づくったのである。」) (Orikuchi, 1976, p. 88). According to Donald Keene, ‘Tōson believed poetry had to be written in a special, elevated language [...]. When, eventually, he came to prefer the language of everyday life, he turned from poetry to prose’ (Keene, 1984, p. 204). 46 「こうして鷗外がもちいた美文は、文語であることによって、卑近な現実に距離をとり、現実より美的な何かをたたえている。「古さ」が新しいスタイルの創出になっているのである。」

31 It thus does not come as a surprise that Ueda Bin dedicated to Mori Ōgai Kaichōon, the single volume that played the most significant role in translating French Decadent poetry into Japanese. 47 Ueda Bin’s career is striking for its precociousness and its short timespan, and deserves to be better known. Bin died in 1916 at only 43 years old from a kidney disease, as a highly respected professor of literature at Kyoto Imperial University (a position he took in 1908). He is credited with introducing to the Japanese public a dazzling array of major European writers, from Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarmé, to Browning and D’Annunzio. His first translation is a short story from Gogol, published in 1893 when he was 21, later included in his 1901 anthology Miotsukushi.48 The wide range of languages Bin dealt with is immediately apparent, and raises the question of his actual capacity to read and translate all of them. As we will see below, Bin’s translations from French display a deep understanding of the source text, and by all accounts Bin had an extraordinary talent for languages. This is summed up in an anecdote that is systematically brought up in the literature about him, and thus seems significant to understand both the context of the time and how much Bin stood out for his brilliance. When a student of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, Bin’s graduation thesis had to be evaluated by a committee, which included Lafcadio Hearn — this must have been in 1897 according to the chronology established by Tanaka Jun (Tanaka, 1957, p. 357). Hearn is said to have been so impressed that he declared: ‘Your erudition and knowledge of English so surpass the other students’ that you are the only Japanese student able to entirely think in English and perfectly express yourself in English’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 14).49

47 Kaichōon indeed open with the following line: ‘This book is dedicated to Mr. Mori Ōgai who is in faraway Manchuria’「遙に満洲なる森鴎外氏に此の書を献ず」(UBZ, vol. 1, p. 22). Ōgai also paid homage to Ueda Bin; he writes for instance in Hatori Chihiro (1912) that his main character, after reading Kaichōon, feels ‘as if he had became drunk on alcohol’ (「酒に酔ったような心持になった」) (OZ, vol. 10, p. 535). 48 It was (and still is to a great extent) common practice in Japan to publish first in a literary magazine texts that may later appear in volume. Most of the poems from Kaichōon had also been previously published in various magazines, such as Myōjō or Teikoku bungaku. ‘Miotsukushi’ originally refers to a naval signage used to mark a sea lane, but, because of its homophony with an expression meaning ‘to dedicated oneself body and soul’ (mostly out of love), the word has been used as a kakekotoba in Japanese poetry since the Heian period. Bin’s volume is titled in hiragana so as to leave the interpretation open. 49 「君は他の学生よりも博識であり、英語をよく知って居り、英語で完全に思考し表現し得る人と成る事のできる一万人唯一人の日本人学生である [...]。」Bin had also as a professor Raphael von Koeber, who taught Western philosophy at Tokyo University from 1893 to 1914, and who had a great influence on numerous illustrious students such as Natsume Sōseki, Watsuji Tetsurō and Nishida Kitarō.

32 The precociousness of such an unique talent can be explained by an equally out of the ordinary familial background. As relatively little is accessible in English on Bin and because his family truly embodies the specificities of these times of transition between Edo and Meiji, some biographical elements need to be mentioned here. Bin’s father Keiji (絅二) had travelled abroad in 1863 as part of the Second Japanese Embassy to Europe.50 When Bin was born in 1874, Keiji was still a civil servant, but the government had by then transformed into the Meiji imperial regime; Bin’s father was then working on the development and modernisation of Hokkaidō. Keiji’s own father was the renowned Confucian scholar Okkotsu Taiken (乙骨耐軒, 1806-1859) who taught at the Shōheizaka Academy or Shōheikō (昌平黌), which was dedicated to educating the elite of the Tokugawa shogunate (Paramore, 2012, pp. 76-78).51 Keiji’s older brother, Okkotsu Tarōotsu ( 乙骨太郎乙 , 1842-1922) became a celebrated scholar himself, and is credited with coming up with the idea for the lyrics of the new Japanese national anthem chosen by the Meiji regime, the Kimigayo.52 His son (Bin’s cousin) Okkotsu Saburō was celebrated as an influential professor of Western style classical music, and Bin himself was well versed in Western music and art (Yamada, 2015, p. 15). Despite the change of regime in 1868 and the abolition of the Tokugawa institutions (the Shōheikō school for instance was closed in 1870), the continuity into Meiji of a familial tradition of intellectual excellence can thus be observed here. Moreover, Bin’s background was marked by openness and curiosity to Western scholarship from his mother’s side as well. His maternal grandfather had also been to Europe as a civil servant, in 1861, and his mother’s younger sister, Ueda Teiko (later named Katsurakawa, 桂川悌子),53 was among the five first female Japanese students to be sent to study abroad, to the United States, as part of the 1871 Iwakura Mission; Teiko’s husband was himself a rangaku or Dutch studies scholar (Mulhern, 1991, p. 209; Kameda, 2005, p. 14).

50 Some sources, such as the Gendai bungaku daijiten (Meiji shoin, 1965), give the date 1867, which is not consistent with the dates of the Second Japanese Embassy to Europe. 51 The school building is known today as the Confucian temple Yushima Seidō in the Bunkyō ward of Tokyo. 52 According to the 1941 memoirs of the vice admiral Sawa Kan’nojō. The lyrics come from a Heian period poem. See http://www.ptylitza.jp/tvarjanka/kimigayo/kimigayo.html (last access 23 August 2017). 53 As it happens frequently in Japan, Bin’s father was adopted into his wife’s family; the name Ueda is thus the name of Bin’s mother.

33 Before the ground breaking Kaichōon appeared in 1905, Bin had already published a number of articles presenting European poetry to the Japanese public. As a student of Tokyo Imperial University, Bin wrote regularly for the magazine affiliated with the University, Teikoku bungaku, from its foundation in 1895. In particular, he was a regular contributor to the column titled ‘Kaigai zōdan’ (Rumours from the literary circles abroad) (Tanaka J., 1957, p. 15). In the second half of the 1890s however, according to Tanaka Jun, ‘for his sophisticated translations and his presentations of the new movements and developments of foreign poetry [...] to become a great current and to exert a significant influence, it would still take about ten years’ (Tanaka J., 1957, pp. 15-16).54 In one of his first columns, in January 1895, he presents ‘the latest trends in Belgian literature’, that is to say mainly Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, and Emile Verhaeren; he also mentions Baudelaire and Verlaine. This text can be considered the very starting point of the introduction of Symbolism into Japan (Tōyama, 2010, p. 364).55 As underlined by Tōyama Hiroo, at that point Bin does not use the term ‘decadence’ in English or in French, nor any Japanese equivalent; nor does he mention the word ‘Symbolism’. However, he does write that these poets are representative of the fin de siècle (seikimatsu) (Tōyama, 2010, p. 365).56 In March 1896, in the same column, Bin announces Verlaine’s death, which had happened the same year in January, and presents Verlaine’s aesthetic under the loanword ‘samuborisuto’, written in katakana, and ‘Symboliste’, written in alphabet. He adds that Verlaine’s poetry shows more ‘passion’ (netsuretsu 熱烈 ) than Stéphane Mallarmé’s, which is more ‘serene’ (hyōbyō 縹渺), but that both share the same aesthetic. His 1898 column ‘Furansu shidan no shinsei’ (New Voices of French Poetry) is considered by Tanaka Jun as ‘playing an extremely important role within the [Japanese] history of poetry’ (Tanaka J., 1957, p. 24). 57 Bin presents these ‘new voices’ as ‘Symbolists [in katakana, samuborisuto], or vers-libristes [in katakana,

54 「彼れの優れた訳詩も、また、彼れの海外詩壇の新しい動きとその行きかたの紹介も、[...] これが大きな流れとなって著しい影響をおよぼすにいたったのは、それからおよそ十年の後のことであった。」 55 The reason Bin started by focusing on these poets, who may be considered minor today compared to Baudelaire and Verlaine, is, according to Yasuda Yaosu, because he had just read a presentation of the Symbolist Belgian magazine La Jeune Belgique, written in English in 1893 by the Scottish writer and critic William Sharp (Tōyama, 2010, p. 384; Yano, 1974, p. 61). 56 See the second part of the Chapter for more details on terminology. 57 「わが詩史の上からみて極めて重要な位置を占めるものと言はなくてはならない。」

34 veru riburisuto]’(UBZ, vol. 3, p. 261), meaning that these poets take liberties with traditional rules of versification. He gives a concrete example of ‘enjambement’ (the word is in French), meaning the continuation of a sentence across different lines and/or stanzas. To illustrate this point, he quotes in French Verlaine’s famous ‘Chanson d’automne’, in which each of the three stanzas is indeed constituted out of a single sentence. Its translation, published in June 1905 in Myōjō and included the same year in Kaichōon, will become one of Bin’s most famous poems. These precisions show the close attention Bin pays to the details of the poetic form, and how he especially enjoys highlighting the innovative spirit of the Symbolist poets, praising their risk-takings and their deviations from versification norms. One could argue that Bin himself took such an approach to translation, as the poems of Kaichōon (Sounds of the Tide) bear witness. The anthology is composed of 57 poems from 29 poets. As Bin writes in the Introduction, there are ‘three Italians [D’Annunzio, Dante, Arturo Graf], four Englishmen [Browning, Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti], seven Germans [Wilhelm Arendt, Carl Busse, Paul Barsch, Eugen Croisant, Heriberte von Poschinger, Theodor Storm, Heinrich Heine], one Provençal [Théodore Aubanel], and as many as fourteen French [Leconte de Lisle, José-Maria de Heredia, Sully Prudhomme, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Victor Hugo, François Coppée, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Henri de Régnier, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Albert Samain, Jean Moréas, Mallarmé]; it contains most of those who belong to the Parnasse school of yesterday and to the contemporary Symbolist school’ (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 25).58 Despite this last precision, the diversity of poets is striking, and the inclusion of Provençal, or the odd exceptions to the nineteenth century — never explained by Bin himself in the paratext — are intriguing. For Tōyama Hiroo, Bin’s selection is mainly circumstantial, and can be explained by the documents that the translator had available when he compiled Kaichōon (Tōyama, 2010, p. 374). It seems that as far as source texts are concerned, Bin mainly had access to anthologies and compilations, such as Poètes d’aujourd’hui (Contemporary Poets) edited by A. Van Bever and Paul Léautaud (Mercure de France, 1900), and Stéphane Mallarmé’s own compilation of Symbolist poems and essays, Vers et Prose (Perrin, 1893) (Tōyama, 2010, p. 385).

58「巻中収むる処の詩五十七章、詩家二十九人、伊太利亜に三人、英吉利に四人、独逸に七人、プロヴァンスに一人、而して仏蘭西には十四人の多きに達し、先の高踏派と今の象徴派とに属する者その大部を占む。」

35 Bin’s selection was thus itself highly dependent on the choices previously made by other authors. Despite this explanation probably being too short to provide a full picture of Bin’s editorial strategies, it reminds us that the hierarchisation of literary works varies in time and space for reasons that can seem often arbitrary. Yet, when texts travel through distance and languages, the representation of literary canons can differ greatly according to the context of their reception. As Lawrence Venuti writes, ‘translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign cultures. The selection of foreign texts and the development of translation strategies can establish peculiarly domestic canons for foreign literatures [...]’ (Venuti, 1998, p. 67). In this respect, one of Bin’s choices that is especially relevant from our perceptive is the way he puts the emphasis on Parnassianism rather than Symbolism in Kaichōon’s Introduction; he explains this out of personal taste: ‘The translator’s sympathy lies with the Parnassians [...]’ (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 25).59 However, as we will see below, Kaichōon was published at a time Symbolism was vividly debated and often attacked within the Japanese literary world; it could be that Bin thought his work would be better received if he displaced the focus from the Symbolist poets — who are, from a quantitative viewpoint, better represented than the Parnassians (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, de Régnier, Vielé-Griffin, Samain, Moréas, and Mallarmé vs. Leconte de Lisle, J.-M. de Heredia, Sully Prudhomme, and François Coppée). Whatever his reasons might have been, there seems to be a tendency in Bin’s writings consciously to create a distance from some features of Symbolism that were considered morally inappropriate at the time — in a nutshell, the obsession with death and sex. In Kaichōon, the five poems from Baudelaire are: ‘L’Albatros’, ‘Harmonie du soir’, ‘La Cloche fêlée’, ‘L’Homme et la mer’, and ‘Les Hiboux’. None of them touch on the themes of physical decay or sexual desires; they mainly articulate the poet’s aspiration for freedom, his desperate attempts to seek an escape from mundane vulgarity, and his pessimistic views on modern society in general. As a result, Symbolism’s most lurid motives and morally ambiguous themes tend to be ignored by the subsequent Japanese poetic circles that can be considered part of Decadence — such as the Circle of Pan; these tended to favour most of all Aestheticism. Typically,

59 「訳者の同情は寧ろ高踏派の上に在り [...]。」

36 Baudelairian themes and motives found a much stronger echo in prose, archetypically in Tanizaki’s early novels.60 Kaichōon thus indubitably contributes to shaping what Jordan Y. Smith calls the translationscape of early twentieth century Japanese poetry. 61 Nevertheless, establishing a clear difference between Bin’s understanding of French poetry and the actual French reception of the time is not an easy task. Time shapes the multiple variations in literary canons arguably more significantly than space, and if today Leconte de Lisle and José-Maria de Heredia seem to belong to a different category than Baudelaire and Verlaine, their hierarchisation must have been undoubtedly much more open to debate a century ago. Moreover, Kaichōon’s specificity is less to be found within the selection of poems than in its translation strategies. In the paratext, Bin displays an extraordinary awareness of the challenges and implications of translating poetry from European languages to Japanese. One of his main principles is to ‘adjust to each poem’s original tempo’ (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 25).62 This was a preoccupation that has never been apparent to this extent in previous Japanese translations (Satō N., 1981, p. 364; Yano, 1974, p. 348). Satō Nobuhiro further writes:

This type of transposition of the ‘original tempo’ manifests itself concretely by the pursuit of the equivalent rhythm in Japanese for the original poem’s versification and tone, and the effective and conscious differentiation of Chinese-origin [kango] and Japanese-origin [wago] vocabulary [...]. The extremely diverse rhythms and forms that can be

60 See Chapter 2. 61 The notion of ‘-scape’ formulated in Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization conveys the ‘historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33). Jordan Smith writes that ‘translationscapes can be thought of as global flows of language-based culture via translation, something that forms a selective, metonymic, partial picture of a “national culture” for the target language community’ (Smith, https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/reign-amoeba-further-thoughts-about-future-comparative- literature, last access 8 November 2017). 62 「其各の原調に適合せしめむ [...]。」

37 found in Kaichōon are the results of Bin’s attempts at translation based on these indubitable principles (Satō N., 1981, p. 364).63

Bin’s flexible approach and his determination to tailor a poetic language suited to express the source text’s specificity correspond to Baudelaire’s idea of art as necessarily innovative and literary conventions as ever evolving. Baudelaire indeed justifies embracing the ‘Decadent’ epithet by the fact that each epoch needs artists able to express the time’s zeitgeist.64 He writes in his essay ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie modern’: ‘Each century and each people have their own beauty, we inevitably have our own (Tous les siècles et tous les peuples ont leur beauté, nous avons inévitablement la nôtre)’ (Salon de 1846, ch. 18; Baudelaire, 1962, p. 195). Echoing this philosophy, Bin writes in an article published in December 1896 in Teikoku bungaku: ‘The Ancients had their own Ancient thought. They created numerous outstanding works of art that reflected this. Our contemporaries have their own contemporary claims’ (Tanaka J., 1957, p. 22).65 Translating for a Japanese audience the specific feel and melody of these French poems implied performing a delicate balancing act between interpretation, mimicry, and communication; it furthermore requires an in-depth knowledge of the source language and, more significantly, of the literary codes and norms of the target language, as stated by Lawrence Venuti:

Even though every work appropriates other works to some extent, a translation is engaged in two, simultaneous appropriations, one of the foreign text, the other of domestic cultural materials. The relation between translation and foreign text is mimetic and interpretative, governed by canons of accuracy and methods of interpretation that vary culturally and historically, whereas the relation between translation and domestic culture

63 「そのような「原調」移植の試みは、具体的には、個々の原詩の句型や声調に照応する日本語のリズムの追求、訳語としての漢語と和語の意識的かつ効果的な使い分け [...] として現れている。『海潮音』所収の訳詩が備える極めて多彩なリズム、形式は、そうした敏の確かな方針に基づく翻訳の試みの結果に他ならない。」 64 See the Introduction. Baudelaire’s theoretical writings were then mainly known in Japan through the presentation and translation of articles from French literary magazines, such as La Revue des deux mondes. Kishigami Shikken (岸上質軒, 1860-1907)’s article of September 1896 in Taiyō for instance introduces Baudelaire’s views on visual art (Yano, 1974, p. 62). 65 「古人には古人の思想ありき。これを恰当なる体形に寓して、幾多秀抜なる芸術品を作りぬ。今人また今人の主張を有す。」

38 is mimetic and communicative, governed by an imitation of cultural materials to address audiences that are culturally and historically specific. (Venuti, 1998, p. 61)

Let us present here two poems from Kaichōon that illustrate two opposite translation strategies. The first, Bin’s translation of ‘Harmonie du soir’, is characterised by an astute usage of the ‘cultural materials’ of the target language; the second, Bin’s translation of ‘Chanson d’automne’, by an extreme mimicry of the source language. Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ is famous for being a pantoum — a poetic form that punctually repeats the same line throughout the poem; its extreme musicality has inspired many musicians, such as Debussy, among others. Bin also puts the emphasis on the poem’s melody when he chooses to translate the title as ‘Kuregata no kyoku’ (Song for when the sun sets). Here are the last lines of the first stanza:

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir ; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige !

(Sounds and scents are turning in the evening air: Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!)

Nioi mo oto mo yūzora ni, tōtōtarari, tōtarari, Warutsu no mai no awaresa yo, tsukare umitaru kurumeki yo (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 62).66

(Scents as well as sounds in the evening sky, tōtōtarari, tōtarari, The pitiful waltz, the weary vertigo.)67

As often in Kaichōon, Bin uses a 7/5 rhythm to render Baudelaire’s alexandrines, and in the last line, the repetition of the ‘yo’, symmetrically framing each set of 7/5

66「匂も音も夕空に、とうとうたらり、とうたらり、/ ワルツの舞の哀れさよ、疲れ倦みたる眩暈よ。」 67 I have deliberately made my translations of the translations as literal as possible.

39 syllabic units, can be read as an attempt to mimic Baudelaire’s use of the caesura at the hemistich (6/6). However, what is especially remarkable here is Bin’s usage of the expression ‘tōtōtarari, tōtarari’ at the end of the first line. The phrase comes from okina, a type of performance presented at the beginning of a Noh play, usually at the New Year (Yamada, 2015, pp. 28-29). ‘Tōtōtarari, tōtarari’ is an onomatopoeic phrase of obscure origin, the meaning of which is much debated; close to an incantation, its sonorities evoke movements — possibly an oscillation or swaying (tōtō) and, through the homophony with the verb tareru (to drip or dangle), a gentle flow downward. The genius of Bin is to have mobilised this expression, coming from an entirely different cultural background than the one of the source text but familiar to any of his Japanese readers; it translates the dance-like, repetitive quality of the poem’s melody, suggested in the original by the rhythm of the alexandrines, the form of the pantoum, and the vocabulary (‘turning’, ‘waltz’, ‘vertigo’). When it comes to Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” on the other hand, Bin does not translate the rhyme but literally re-enacts it in his Japanese version, ending most lines of his poem with the same syllable or phoneme.

Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur D’une langueur Monotone.

(The long sobs Of the autumn Violins Harm my heart With a monotonous Languidness.)

Aki no hi no Vioron no

40 Tameiki no Mi ni shimite Hitaburu ni Ura kanashi (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 75).68

(Of the autumn day The violins Their sighs Sink in my heart Extremely How sad.)

Bin also drops the alternation of 7/5 syllables in favour of a succession of short lines with only five syllables, in order to mimic Verlaine’s broken octosyllables.69 From this attention to detail and the deep understanding of the source poem on both a micro and macro level, there is no doubt in my view that Bin was working directly from the original French texts. Moreover, Bin often uses French words in alphabet in his articles, as mentioned above, and even quotes the original poem in French as in the case of ‘Chanson d’autome’ in Teikoku bungaku in 1898. About this last famous translation, Donald Keene even remarks: ‘How much superior his Japanese version is to the English one!’ (Keene, 1984, p. 227). It is difficult to know to what extent Bin consulted English translations of French poems, and I have not seen any clear sign that he did. Considering his highly self-aware translation practice, it is probable that Bin was curious and well informed about translations of the same source texts in other languages; but this same awareness also led him to develop a highly personalised approach to translation. Bin indeed supports his various translation strategies with an abundant theoretical apparatus. Kaichōon’s ‘Introduction’ is rich in details about Bin’s vision of

68「秋の日の/ヴィオロンの/ためいきの/身にしみて/ひたぶるに/ うら悲し。」 69 Establishing whether Japanese can truly rhyme or not, or whether its rhythm can be compared to French poetry’s metric-scheme, is quite a difficult task. As John Wixted notices, ‘if English is problematic for recreating such rhyme-schemes, Japanese is even more so, for English is (like German) a syllable-stress language, rather than a syllable-count language (like Japanese or classical Latin).’ Wixted writes about Meiji Japanese poetry’s attempt at rhyme before Bin, focusing on Ōgai’s Omokage (於母影, 1889) (Wixted, 2009, pp. 99-100).

41 translation. It shows how much Bin was aware that linguistic translation is by no means a simple technical procedure.

Translators do not like willingly to comment on their own translation techniques. However, I must admit that on translating poetry, I hold similar views to the ones Rossetti professes about his translations of classical Italian poetry. He who tries to transplant the beauty of foreign poetry should not sacrifice his taste for novelty for the sake of the pre- existing techniques developed within the rich poetry of his native land (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 28).70

Bin is thus writing that the translator should not feel bound by the poetic conventions of the target language; this echoes his earlier articles quoted above where he claims that the main purpose of his translation is to ‘polish’, or rejuvenate, the Japanese language. Moreover, Bin immediately adds to the previous extract that ‘literal translation is not necessarily faithful translation.’71 Translation’s main challenge is therefore to devise a language that manages to transmit the source text’s newness, as Antoine Berman puts it: ‘Good translation [...] manifests in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text’ (Berman, 2000, p. 89). It is through a complete and total assimilation within the target language that the original work can find, in Walter Benjamin’s term, its ‘afterlife’; a translation cannot become a work of art in its own right without the source text undergoing radical transformation, and transformation is the condition for the survival of texts beyond linguistic and cultural borders (Benjamin, 1968, p. 71).

70「訳述の法に就ては訳者自ら語るを好まず。只訳詩の覚悟に関して、ロセッティが伊太利古詩翻訳の序に述べたると同一の見を持したりと告白す。異邦の詩文の美を移植せむとする者は、既に成語に富みたる自国詩文の技巧の為め、清新の趣味を犠牲にする事あるべからず。」 71 「しかも彼所謂逐語訳は必らずしも忠実訳にあらず。」

42 2. Kaichōon’s Legacy: the Poet-Translator

Bin’s approach to translation had a far-reaching influence among Japanese poets and writers. In particular, Bin had a direct impact on the artistic orientation and aesthetic of the literary magazine Myōjō (Morning Star). Created in April 1900, Myōjō was the organ of the poetic circle organised in 1899 by Yosano Tekkan (also called Hiroshi), Shinshisha (The New Poetry Society). Along with major authors such as Ōgai, Masaoka Shiki, and his master Ochiai Naobumi, Tekkan had been active since the 1890s in renovating Japanese poetry, but it is only from 1900 and his marriage with Akiko that, as a couple, the Yosanos and their circle became known as the main advocates for the poetic expression of romantic passion, sensuality, and individualism (Keene, 1984, pp. 15-20). From the very first issue, Myōjō fulfilled a double purpose: to showcase the works of up-and-coming poets and to translate and present foreign literature. Next to Akiko’s revolutionary verses celebrating a woman’s freedom to love and desire (Morton, 2009, pp. 43-72), the magazine would publish an essay on Turgenev by Kanbara Ariake or Hirata Tokuboku’s translations of D’Annunzio (Yamada, 2015, pp. 13-14); as Yamada Toyoko writes, ‘these essays on foreign literature were the jewels of Myōjō just as much as Akiko’s tanka, and they were in no way less important’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 14).72 In February 1901, Ueda Bin published his first contribution to Myōjō, an essay on English literature introducing the works of numerous authors, from Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, to Dickens, Walter Scott, and Henry James. Bin was only one year younger than Tekkan, which made him older than the other overwhelmingly young contributors to the magazine, and his reputation was well established; having someone like Bin publish lengthy essays in his new

72 「晶子の短歌に劣らずこの海外文学論もまた「明星」の華だったのだ。」Tanka refers to the dominant form of Japanese poetry (waka); it consists of five lines following the syllabic pattern 5/7/5/7/7. Masaoka Shiki first called for a modernisation of the tanka in the 1890s (Beichman, 2002, p. 26). The shintaishi (new style poetry) form during the Meiji era still follows, more or less loosely, the 5/7 syllables pattern, but the poet is free to use the vocabulary he sees fit. Shintaishi originated in 1882 with the publication of Shintaishi-shō (Poetry in the New Style), a collection of mainly translations of European poetry. ‘The translators insisted that foreign poems, unlike traditional Japanese poetry, were not fettered by artificial poetic diction. “The result is that anyone, even a small child, can understand poetry, providing he knows the language of the country.”’ (Keene, 2013, p. 144). Considering the Myōjō poets’ approach to language, inspired by Aestheticism, Symbolism, and the spirit of bibun (beautiful writing), the shintaishi was not necessarily their favourite form, and Myōjō mainly published tanka.

43 magazine was undoubtedly a victory for Tekkan, and their correspondence shows Tekkan’s eagerness to invite Bin to join his circle and his gratitude at Bin’s acceptance (Yamada, 2015, pp. 4-15). Yamada Toyoko explains Myōjō’s dedication to introducing foreign literature and the magazine’s appeal to Bin as follows.

A revolution in poetry is intricately linked to the issue of linguistic expression. For those who were abandoning the old waka and seeking a new language, the Western words coming from across the sea had an irresistibly attractive tone to them, and Tekkan was paying acute attention. This is how he succeeded in inviting Ueda Bin to Myōjō (Yamada, 2015, p. 16).73

Myōjō’s double orientation — translation and creation — was indeed deeply complementary both in practice and in theory. In July 1902, about a year after Myōjō first appreaed, the magazine published a manifesto clarifying its purpose and function. Under the question ‘What was the magazine Myōjō created for?’, ten different reasons were listed:

1. Translating and introducing Western literature and art. 2. Researching and creating new tanka. 3. Creating and evaluating shintaishi. 4. Creating pictures and designs. 5. Renovating bibun style writing and the novel. 6. Creating new haiku. 7. Producing criticism and reporting on both the literary and the artistic worlds. 8. Presenting new talents. 9. Encouraging women’s writing.

73 「詩歌の革命は究極のところ言語表現の問題にゆきつく [...]。旧来の和歌を排して新しい言葉を探ねる者の耳に、海の向こうからやってきた西洋の言葉はいかにも魅惑的な調べを響かせたにちがいない。鉄幹は、聡くそれに耳をそばたてたのだ。だからこそ上田敏を「明星」にひきよせることができたのである。」

44 10. Opposing [...] imitators and frivolous fashionable literary and artistic magazines.74

The magazine’s priorities clearly appear: translation comes first, tanka second, shintaishi third.75 Whatever the form, the Myōjō group held novelty as a supreme value; this, added to the magazine’s strong involvement in visual arts, corresponds to Baudelaire’s vision of the necessary correspondence among different forms of art in expressing modernity.76 Myōjō and the publications affiliated to the group thus greatly contributed to introducing the art nouveau aesthetic to Japan (Sadoya, 1982, pp. 70- 78), as illustrated by the famous cover of Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), Yosano Akiko’s debut volume of tanka, designed by Fujishima Takeji.77 Around Myōjō thus gathered young poets and artists passionate about the European fin de siècle aesthetic, and worshipping Ueda Bin as the genius at translating Symbolism. Among them, Kitahara Hakushū (1885-1942) wrote abundantly about the effect Kaichōon had on him, as a young man of only twenty years old: ‘I was deeply moved by Mr. Ueda’s Kaichōon; it was as if my heart had caught fire. [...] Dr. Ueda Bin sensei was the mother of my soul, as one may say that the father of my soul was Mori Ōgai sensei [...]. The two are my beloved teachers [onshi]’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 24).78 He further adds about Ueda Bin:

74 「雑誌「明星」は何が為めに生れたる乎。（一）西欧文芸の翻訳紹介（二）新短歌の研究と創作（三）新体詩の創作と批評（四）絵画及び図案の創作（五）美文及小説の革新（六）新俳句の創作（七）文学美術両界の批評と報道（八）新進才人の紹介（九）女流文学の奨勧（十）[...] 模倣者、及び軽佻なる流行文芸雑誌等に反対す。」 75 Masaoka Shiki’s magazine Hototogisu specialised in haiku, a term famously coined by Shiki himself. This may be one of the reasons why Myōjō only marginally published haiku and did not put haiku higher in their list. In any case, both groups practiced diverse forms of poetry and prose. 76 What is known as synesthesia (a term Baudelaire himself never used) focuses on the material experience of the complementarity of the senses, and thus only partially expresses Baudelaire’s idea of correspondances. ‘In his criticism and prose works it was the idea of correspondence among the arts and senses that attracted [Baudelaire] [...]. What he sought was the essential unity behind the appearances’ (Roedig, 1958, p. 128). In A Rebours, Des Esseintes puts into practice this correspondence among sensorial and artistic experiences. The idea of the complementarity of different art forms, which was not only Baudelaire’s but was also developed by other artists and writers, had a strong influence in nineteenth century Europe, culminating in Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk. 77 See also Chapter 2 on Aestheticism. 78 「上田氏の『海潮音』に感激して二人の心は火のやうに燃え上がった。[...] 博士上田敏先生は私の魂の母であった。この意味で [...] 森鷗外先生は私の魂の父であると云ひ得る。二先生は全く私の恩師である。」

45 It is easy to judge just by looking at my debut volume of poetry Jashūmon (The Heretics, 1909). One can see there how deeply I was influenced by and how much I had read and re-read the Doctor’s Miotsukushi, Bungeiron-shū (Collection of Essays on Literature and Art), and Kaichōon. Me knowing about Sappho’s fragments, about Chopin, about the young modern Belgian poets, about French Parnassianism, about Symbolism, and about the fin de siècle symphony between the Decadent [taitō] senses and nerves, is all thanks to Doctor Ueda (Yamada, 2015, pp. 26-27).79

According to this testimony, Ueda Bin is clearly to be credited with introducing to Japan more than French poetic movements, such as Parnassianism and Symbolism: his translation and literary criticism (the one being inseparable from the other) launched a whole aesthetic that Hakushū aptly sums up as ‘the fin de siècle symphony between the decadent senses and nerves’. His volume Jashūmon thus celebrates the delights and mysteries of exotic materials — such as ivory and velvet —, foreign artistic motives — such as the Christian cross —, and the power of liquors and wines. So does the debut volume of his fellow Myōjō poet Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885-1945), Shokugo no uta (Songs for After the Meal, 1917). The difference between the two volumes lies mainly in the contemporary setting of Mokutarō’s work (celebrating the pleasures offered by bars in Ginza for instance), where Hakushū found his inspiration in Sixteenth-century Southern Japan.80 Yano Hōjin notices how Mokutarō’s work contributed to spreading Baudelaire’s influence in its own way; despite Mokutarō never publishing translations per se, his writings contain direct quotations from Baudelaire or allusions to the poet. In particular, recurring references to Cythera — taken to be the birthplace of the goddess of love Venus — contributed to make the poem ‘Un Voyage à Cythère’ well known and loved among the time’s poetic circles (Yano, 1974, p. 72).

79 「私の処女詩集『邪宗門』を見てもわかる。私はどれほど深く博士の『みをつくし』や『文芸論集』や『海潮音』に喰い込んで行ってゐるか、どれほど深い薫染を受けてゐるかわかる。私がサッフォの断章を知り、ショパンを知り、近代白耳義の若い詩人たちを知り、仏蘭西の高踏派、象徴詩派の諸種の詩風を知り、世紀末の頽唐した諸官能と神経との交響楽を知り得たのは全く博士のお陰であった。」 Ueda Bin published an article about Sappho titled ‘Saffo no kashū’ (Anthology of Poetry by Sappho) in Bungakukai in December 1896. 80 For more details, see Chapter 3.

46 When Hakushū and Mokutarō decided to gain independence from Yosano Tekkan and, under the patronage of Mori Ōgai, created their own magazine in 1909, Subaru (The Pleiades), the death mask of Baudelaire was chosen to illustrate the cover of the first issue (Yano, 1974, p. 73). As underlined by Yamada Toyoko, the young men of Subaru were more unapologetically hedonistic, less sentimental than their mentor’s Shinshisha had been; 1905, besides being the year Kaichōon was published, also marked the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Unlike the Yosanos, the Subaru poets had been too young to be directly affected by the atmosphere of the war81 and, turning their back to their fathers’ sense of duty and responsibility, were first and foremost concerned with enjoying the insouciance of an après guerre (Yamada, 2015, p. 76). This is how extracts of Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels were published for the first time in Japanese in Subaru, translated by the poet Takamura Kōtarō (1883-1956) (Yano, 1974, pp. 91-92). Meanwhile, Yosano Tekkan himself, despite having to face the disintegration of his circle and the slow death of his magazine Myōjō (the last issue appeared in 1908), was not left idle. His volume of poetry Sōmon (Love Poems, 1909), a self- proclaimed work in the ‘Symbolist style’ (shōchō-shi teki), shows an explicit intertextual stance with repeated references to Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’, Henri de Régnier’s ‘Crépuscule’, and Mallarmé’s ‘Le Cygne’ (Yamada, 2015, pp. 61-62). Five years later, Tekkan (who published under the name Hiroshi from 1908 onwards) produced a volume of translations, compiled mostly during his stay in Paris, Rira no hana (The Lila Flowers, 1914) — the title chosen in homage to the Parisian café La Closerie des Lilas (Yamada, 2015, p. 165). It comprises poems mostly by Henri de Régnier, Anna de Noailles, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Even though this volume encountered little success and is considered of relatively poor quality, its ‘Introduction’ is interesting. Tekkan indeed explains as follows his taste in poetry.

It is not as if every person in France is filled with joy, and there are some miserable people who have not been invited to life’s banquet [...]; while being rebuked as “obsolete”, “weak”, or “morbid”, these people have no choice but to write sincere poetry about their true self. This is why now

81 Yosano Akiko’s famous anti-war poem ‘Kimi shini tamau koto nakare’ is thus a heart-wrenching plea for her younger brother not to die in a senseless war.

47 [...] there is no shortage of wretched DECADENT poetry (Yosano, 1914, pp. 11-12).82

For Tekkan, Decadence is thus about those who are sad, weak, and out of touch with modernity; it is also about expressing the self. In 1909, in an article titled ‘Futsukoku ni okeru inshō-ha’ (French Impressionism), Nagai Kafū had a similar interpretation. He insists that impressionism — under which he includes François Coppée, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, or Remy de Gourmont — represents ‘the literary display of individualism’; he adds that impressionism ‘demands total freedom to express the self’s feelings fully’ (KZ, vol. 6, p. 324). 83 Kafū wrote about discovering Baudelaire through Ueda Bin (Yamada, 2015, p. 28). His 1913 volume of translations Sangoshū (The Coral Anthology) is listed by Ōtsuka Yukio as the second milestone after Kaichōon in the introduction of French Symbolism into Japan. Sangoshū contains poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Henri de Régnier, Anna de Noailles, and others. Ōtsuka reckons that Sangoshū has aged better than Kaichōon, which ‘smells too Japanese’; he writes that

While Kaichōon’s objective was to enlighten the [Japanese] literary world by bringing over the scents of Western poetry, Kafū translated poetry in order to polish his own sensitivity and language [...]; compared to Ueda Bin’s splendid grand style, Kafū’s style is so supple that it may seem at first nearly casual. Despite most of the volume being written in bungo style, his translation has the freedom that suits the spirit and elegance of the source poems (Ōtsuka, 1974, p. 21).84

82 「仏蘭西とても生の喜色に満ちた人人のみあるので無く、生の饗宴に落伍した傷ましい人人もあるから、其等の人人は [...] 「時代おくれよ」、「弱者よ」、「死せる者よ」と罵られても、正直に真デカダン実の自己を歌ふより外に道がない。其れが今 [...] 悲惨なDECADENTの詩の断えない所以である。」 83 「文学上に於ける個人主義の発揮である。[...] 自己の感想を遺憾なく発表せむためにあらゆる自由を要求して居る。」 84 「和臭が強すぎ[る。] [...] 『海潮音』は、上田敏が西詩の余香をはじめて移し入れて、文壇を啓発することを目的としたのに対し、荷風は、自家の感情と文辞とを洗練せしめる助けにしようと思って訳詩の業に至ったというが、[...] 前者の華麗豪著に対し、一見無造作と見えるほどに柔軟なこなし方である。全篇多くは文語ながら、原詩の精神・気韻にふさわしい自由な訳しぶりである。」

48 In the ‘Introduction’, Kafū explains the title by the fact that, during the sakoku period, the importation of coral was supposedly forbidden in Japan; he compares the introduction of these French poems into Meiji Japan to this previously forbidden, dangerous activity. What is certain is that concerning Baudelaire, Kafū’s choices are more daring than Bin’s. Among the seven poems translated — ‘Le Mort joyeux’, ‘Spleen (Quand le ciel bas et lourd)’, ‘Obsession’, ‘L’Ennemi’, ‘Chant d’automne’ ‘Une Charogne’, ‘Tristesses de la lune’ — some — and especially ‘Une Charogne’ — are extremely gruesome in the detailed description of physical corruption and decay. As Yano Hōjin observes, Kafū also repeatedly mentions Baudelaire in the short stories of Amerika monogatari (American Stories, 1908), and quotes some of the most explicitly sexual poems such as ‘Sed non satiata’ (Yano, 1974, pp. 75-76). Following Kaichōon and Sangoshū, a third volume was instrumental in translating French Decadent poetry: Horiguchi Daigaku’s Gekka no ichigun (A Crowd Under the Moon, 1925). It is remarkable for the way it combines authors already presented by the two previous volumes — Baudelaire (with a translation of the famous ‘Invitation au voyage’), Verlaine (with a re-translation of ‘Chanson d’automne’), Mallarmé, Leconte de Lisle, Maeterlinck, Anna de Noailles, Jean Moréas, Henri de Régnier... — with newcomers: Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Louÿs, Paul Morand, Jules Laforgue, Raymond Radiguet, Charles Cros, and especially Guillaume Apollinaire. In this sense, the volume really does bring Japanese Decadent poetry up to date with its latest modernist variations. If Verlaine’s ‘Chanson d’automne’ had been, twenty years earlier, one of the high points of Kaichōon, Apollinaire’s ‘Sous le pont Mirabeau’ is one of the high points of Gekka no ichigun. The simplicity of Apollinaire’s language admirably builds on the same themes — melancholy, regret, nostalgia — articulated by Verlaine; another of Apollinaire’s poems translated by Horiguchi Daigaku, ‘Salomé’, displays the same will to put a modernist take on a motive that, through Wilde, had been canonised by late nineteenth century Decadence. As for the previous two volumes, the key to Gekka no ichigun’s success lies in the way the translator managed to create a language that was able to transmit the general tempo and feel of the source material while making perfect sense to the readers at the time of the publication. Thus, Horiguchi’s style clearly illustrates the evolution of the Japanese language over a short time span. Ōtsuka Yukio compares as follows the three volumes, Kaichōon, Sangoshū, and Gekka no ichigun:

49 Contrary to Ueda Bin and Kafū, Daigaku was not dexterous in manipulating the Japanese kogo [classical style] nor the gago [elegant style] or the kango [Japanese words of Chinese origins]; therefore, in these translated poems, few are successful in their usage of the bungo [literary] style. [...] Specifically because he lacked skills in rhetoric, he succeeded in ‘not sacrificing his taste for novelty for the sake of the pre- existing techniques developed within the rich poetry of his native land’ ([as advocated by Bin in] Kaichōon’s Introduction) (Ōtsuka, 1974, p. 21).85

In a more recent study on Horiguchi Daigaku, Hasegawa Ikuo advances a more nuanced analysis of Daigaku’s language, claiming that he managed to add ‘to the written style [bungo] the tenderness [or simplicity, yasashisa] of the spoken style [kōgo], and to the spoken style the intensity [or severity, kibishisa] of the written style’ (Hasegawa, 2009, p. 8).86 Horiguchi Daigaku was the son of a diplomat, and spent most of his life abroad from an early age; he was a friend of Cocteau, Morand, Marie Laurencin, and many others. As a young aspiring poet, he had not only been a member of Yosano Tekkan’s New Poetry Society and published in Myōjō, but he also had had Kafū as a professor of French literature at Keiō University in 1910-1911.87 Following these three volumes of translated poetry thus provides a footprint of the Francophile Japanese Decadent milieu.88

85 「上田敏や荷風とちがって、大学は日本の古語・雅語および漢語をあやつるに巧みでなく、したがってこの訳詩中でも、文語訳には成功したものが多くない。[...] 敏や荷風のようなレトリックもなかった彼は、その代わりにかえって「成語に富みたる自国詩文の技巧の為め、清新の趣味を犠牲にする」（『海潮音』序）にはおちいらなかった。」 86 「文語に口語のやさしさを、口語に文語のきびしさを。」 87 For the importance of Keiō University and its literary magazine Mita bungaku within Japanese Decadence, see Chapter 2. 88 The connection can be observed further; Mishima Yukio wrote about what Horiguchi Daigaku’s translations meant for him as follows: ‘There are two or three other translations of the masterpiece Radiguet wrote before he died at twenty, Le Bal du comte d’Orgel, but for me it has to be the version by Horiguchi Daigaku. I was absolutely mad about Le Bal du comte d’Orgel as the piece of art of Japanese language that Mr. Horiguchi has crafted, it really was the Bible of my young years’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 238).「ラディゲが二十歳で夭折する前に書いた傑作『ドルジェル伯の舞踏会』には他の訳者の訳も二、三あるが、私にとってのそれは、どうしても堀口大學氏の訳でなくてはならない。私は、堀口氏の創った日本語の芸術作品としての『ドルジェル伯の舞踏会』に、完全にイカれてゐたのであるから。それは正に少年時代の私の聖書であった。」

50 To these three key-figures many others could be added, but none was more significant than Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Tanizaki’s case is indeed an interesting illustration of our argument in favour of the centrality of diverse translation practices within the creation of Japanese Decadence. Tanizaki translated relatively little: Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1919), Thomas Hardy’s Barbara of the House of Grebe (1927), and Stendhal’s L’Abbesse de Castro (1928). In 1919, he also published eight prose poems by Baudelaire in two instalments in the magazine Kaihō. As we have seen below, Baudelaire’s prose poems were known indirectly in Japan, mainly through the lectures Lafcadio Hearn gave at Tokyo Imperial University at the beginning of the century. The complete prose poems however were not published until after the Second World War, translated by the poet and critic Miyoshi Tatsuji (1900-1964) or by famous French literature scholars Murakami Kikuichirō (1910- 1982) and Fukunaga Takehiko (1918-1979). Tanizaki was thus producing a pioneer work in Baudelairean translation.89 However, Tanizaki was translating from English, and it seems that he had had no access to the French texts; from the choice of poems (‘Enivrez-vous’, ‘Les Bienfaits de la lune’, ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’,Le Désir de peindre”, ‘La Chambre double’, ‘Un Plaisant’, ‘Chacun sa chimère’, and ‘Déjà !’) to the details of the translation, it is possible to deduce that he was working from an anthology of English translations by F.P. Sturm (1879-1942) (Nozaki, 2003, p. 169). By all accounts, Tanizaki was not proficient in foreign languages.90 The author himself declared in an interview for Chūō kōron in December 1927, about his translation from Thomas Hardy:

I have no confidence in languages, and I am not used to translation. [...] [For this translation,], I was lucky enough to catch some old friends who came to my place [...] and begged them to teach me a little, but I am sure there must be some mistakes (Inoue K., 2011, p. 20).91

89 However, the poet Tominaga Tarō (1901-1925) had translated one of Baudelaire’s prose poems in 1921 (see Matsumoto Masahiro, 2013). 90 He nevertheless seemed to have had a good understanding of written English (Nozaki, 2003, p. 166); he was also very good at kanbun. 91 「私は語学に自信がなく、翻訳に馴れていない [...]。折よく旧友[...] が遊びに来たのを掴まえて、同君たちに教えを乞うたが、勿論間違いもあるであろう。」Tanizaki’s comment seems to be mainly motivated by a desire to appear modest and needs not be taken literally.

51 This extremely relaxed attitude towards the accuracy of the translation, and the open acknowledgment of a less than complete understanding of the source language, point towards the larger context of a very different translation culture than the one known today both in Japan and the West, characterised by a sacralisation of the source text.92 This is illustrated for example by Gayatri Spivak’s following remark, which seems to sum up quite well the current general consensus around translation: ‘Translation is the most intimate act of reading. Unless the translator has earned the right to become the intimate reader, she cannot surrender to the test, cannot respond to the special call of the text’ (Spivak, 1993, p. 183). In his study on early twentieth century translations made by famous Japanese authors, Inoue Ken goes as far as claiming that there is no guarantee for any of these type of translations that the author who signed them really did the entirety of the translation work (Inoue K., 2011, p. 3). He furthermore reckons that there is no doubt Tanizaki wrote his own translations from shitayaku, or a ‘pre-translation’, made by someone else (Inoue K., 2011, p. 109). This means that authors, even when well established, found some benefit in signing translations, whether on a financial level or for reasons of prestige.93 It also exemplifies how works of literature are not born out of the labour of a single individual, contrary to the common misconception conveyed by a romantic representation of the creative genius. Translation is by definition the locus of a collaborative work as it entails a shared authorship between the author of the source text and the translator. In the words of Loffredo and Perteghella,

Collaboration, at the same time partnership venture and text-devising practice, sits at the heart of ‘creative’ translation, demonstrating how creativity is not an individualistic concept. A collaborative project, either a translator working together with the source language writer or with other translators, turns out to be an important translational moment displaying the richness of each subjectivity simultaneously entering into relationships with the text and language, creating intriguing intertextual configurations;

92 About Rira no hana, Yosano Tekkan also writes that he translated poetry ‘for learning the language’ 「語学のために」(Yamada, 2015, p. 165). 93 Nozaki Kan analyses how selling translations became especially profitable from the enpon boom of 1926 onwards; this also meant that a certain number of medium of low quality translations was easily available on the market (Nozaki, 2003, pp. 167-169).

52 collaborations ultimately allow us to see how the people involved are all contributors, that is co-writers (Loffredo and Perteghella, 2006, p. 8).

This necessary collaborative side of translation may have been better understood and accepted within the Japanese context given the existence of an official, acknowledged tradition of ghostwriting (or daisaku) that the Meiji literary world had inherited from literary practices of the Edo period. Taking as examples writings from Kawabata Yasunari, Yokomitsu Riichi and Kikuchi Kan, Kōno Kensuke (2016) shows how much more complex the attribution of authorship really is, and the decisive role of editors and collaborators. In the words of Dominique Maingueneau, literary works — and translations here are exemplary — are ‘crossroads (carrefour)’, ‘knot[s] within multiple series of other works and other genres (nœud dans de multiples séries d’autres œuvres, d’autres genres)’ (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 204). Furthermore, Tanizaki’s approach to translation hints towards a displacement of the function of translation within the Japanese context, something that Ueda Bin’s theoretical writings had already underlined. Indeed, in another article concerning his translation of Hardy, one can read: ‘“It is fine if there is some mistranslation”, says Mr. Tanizaki. He probably means that the aim is elsewhere’ (Chūō kōron November 1927; Inoue K., 2011, p. 20). 94 As Inoue Ken underlines, Hardy’s novella that Tanizaki translated inspired plotlines and motives for several of Tanizaki’s original creations, from Tade kū mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1928) to Shunkinshō (1933) (Inoue K., 2011, p. 20). As Inoue puts it,

For the Japanese modern writers, adaptation and translation presented occasions to borrow themes and ideas, but more importantly, it was the place to practice the discipline of the writer, where they could learn their penmanship and establish their own mode of narration and style (Inoue K., 2011, p. 35).95

94 「「誤訳なんか、たといあったっていいさ。」谷崎氏はそう言っておられる。目的が他に在るという意味だろう。」 95 「日本の近代作家たちにとって翻案や翻訳は [...]、テーマや着想を借用する機会である以上に、小説の筆法を学び、自らの叙法や文体を確立するための、言うなれば作家修行の場であったのである。」

53 This translation culture has a double consequence. On the side of the original creations, it entails a literature rich with intertextuality that does not shy away from cultural and linguistic hybridity.96 Secondly, the translations themselves become part of the national literature as they are written in a highly readable, sophisticated and attractive target language; they do not need the shadow of the source text to be literary texts in their own right, just as Ueda Bin was advocating in the text quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Thus, the Japanese translation culture of the first half of the twentieth century offers an invaluable insight into the ‘break down’ of the ‘distinction between writing and translating’ that Susan Bassnett sees as crucial for the future of translation studies (Bassnett, 2006, p. 175). Tanizaki’s translations of Baudelaire are a case in point. The way they were produced — from English translations by an author who professes his inability to fully understand the language — would automatically put their validity into question according to our contemporary academic criteria; however, the beauty of their narrative style and the strongly moving voice of the author that make itself heard are elements that not only faithfully reflect the spirit of Baudelaire’s own project but that also make the translations highly enjoyable for the Japanese reader (Nozaki, 2003, pp. 170-172). Tanizaki would translate again during the War, which testifies to the sustained role translation played honing his craft as an author. Although this time, he practiced intralingual translation, transposing The Tale of Genji into contemporary Japanese. Numerous annotated edition of the original Tale of Genji already existed, as well as previous gendaigo yaku versions (translations into contemporary Japanese), one of the first ones from Yosano Akiko. The fact that Tanizaki nevertheless felt the need to produce his own translation of the classic masterpiece shows once again that translation’s real stake did not lie, in his eyes as in many of his contemporaries’, in the comprehension of the source text alone, but in the rich and intense intertextuality that develops within the target language when translation is approached as creative art.

96 See also Chapter 3.

54 3. The Japanese Language of Decadence

As ideas travel, their semantic core can be slightly or dramatically displaced according to the ways they are translated. ‘Translated’ here means both on the cultural and linguistic levels, the two being interdependent. In the case of Decadence in early twentieth century Japan, a large array of translation techniques are possible, as the Japanese language not only accepts direct imports from foreign languages, transcribed in katakana, but also offers diverse combinations of kanji in order to convey meaning and put the emphasis on one or several specific aspects of Decadence. Furthermore, related terms such as Symbolism, Impressionism, and fin de siècle, are also used, very often interchangeably, to described similar or related phenomena. The loanword dekadan (decadent) appears in katakana as early as August 1897, in an article by Ueda Bin for Teikoku bungaku titled ‘Furansu bungaku no kenkyū’ (Studies on French Literature) (Tōyama, 2010, p. 368) — at least eight years earlier than 1905, the date that Ikuho Amano, quoting Seigo Nakao (1992), puts forward in her own study on Japanese Decadence (Amano, 2013, p. 1).

Baudelaire is the singular genius of unhappiness born out of the current modern thought. [...] His reputation comes from being the founder of the ‘Decadent’ poetic school, which also owes him the hatred of some critics. His genius, which, displaying acute sensitivity does not leave any corner of the melancholic rhyme unexplored, cannot be denied. His poetry has long been the friend of the poets and a model for their art [...], and is a perfect document from which to observe the cultural situation of the second half of the nineteenth century (UBZ, vol. 3, p. 194).97

Ueda Bin’s somewhat lukewarm but admirably non-partisan presentation of Decadence is here clearly represented, and his position seems to have changed little over time. Throughout his writings, Bin repeatedly acknowledges the historical and artistic significance of what Max Nordau calls ‘the School of Baudelaire’, while never

97 「ボドレエルは近代の思潮が生みし薄倖の鬼才なり。[...]『デカダン』詩社の開祖として一種の評論家に蛇蝎視せらるるも故無きにあらず。されど鋭敏の情感を以て、幽趣微韻のくまくまを味ひ盡したる其天才は到底否定せらるべきものにあらず。彼の詩は永く詩人の友、技巧の摸範となり、[...] 十九世紀後半期文化の状況を察せしむる恰當の史料たるを得べし。」

55 being a champion of the cause himself. This is how eight years later, in the ‘Introduction’ of Kaichōon, he writes: ‘The translator’s sympathy rather lies with the Parnassians, or with the poems of Aubanel and D’Annunzio. Yet, I am not one to attack the Symbolists, calling them obtuse or strange’ (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 25).98 Bin’s own lack of sympathy for the Baudelairian core of the Decadent aesthetic indeed did not prevent him from writing about Symbolism and translating Symbolist poems, which resulted in Kaichōon being remembered mainly as the corner-stone of the ‘transplanting’ (ishoku) of Symbolism into Japanese poetry, as Tanaka Jun writes (Tanaka J., 1957, pp. 17-18).99 One of the impacts Bin’s personal taste had on Japanese poetic circles, however, may be the general predilection for Verlaine over Baudelaire. In an article published in June 1900 in the magazine Taiyō (The Sun), Bin indeed presents Les Fleurs du mal as a ‘pathological work (byōteki sakuhin)’ and adds:

Thus the ‘Decadent’ poetic school had its moment, but it created such a unique style that within the world of poetry it is a trunk without any branches. Only the poems of its leader Paul Verlaine (1844-96), with their profound elegance, display exquisitely serene beauty and charm (UBZ, vol. 8, p. 31).100

Meanwhile, Ueda Bin was not the only one to use the term ‘Decadent’ in the 1890s. Unsurprisingly, it is in the writings of Mori Ōgai that the word can also be found. From February to September 1899, Ōgai translated and presented the German philosopher Johannes Volkelt’s Aesthetische Zeitfragen (Current Issues in Aesthetics,

98 「訳者の同情は寧ろ高踏派の上に在り、はたまたダンヌンチオ、オオバネルの詩に注げり。然れども又徒らに晦渋と奇怪とを以て象徴派を攻むる者に同ぜず。」 99 ‘Despite this, when judging the effect of [Bin’s] translations in terms of influence over the Japanese poetic world and general success, the transplantation of Symbolist poetry needs to be acknowledged as the most significant’.「けれども、しかしその訳業の日本詩壇におよぼした影響およびその功積のうへから見れば、象徴詩の移植こそ第一にあげらなければならないものである。」 100 「而して輓近「デカダン」詩社の勢少く時を得たれど、曠世の風格を創めて、詩壇の木鐸たるの技なし。唯其首領ポウル、ヹルレイヌ（一八四四—九六）の詩は、一種幽婉の風ありて縹渺たる妙趣を具ふ。」 It is worth noting that Bin uses the same adjective hyōbyō (serene) here to qualify Verlaine’s poetry as he had done about Mallarmé in the 1896 article for Teikoku bungaku mentioned above.

56 1895) in the magazine Mesamashigusa, under the title ‘Shinbi shinsetsu’ (New Theories on Aesthetics).101 In the issue of May 1899, Ōgai writes:

Those who talk about the époque (fin de siècle), called Symbolists [shōchō-ha](Symbolists, Décadents), [...] hold realism as old-fashioned and worthy of pity. [...] Modern men are of nervous dispositions (Nervositaet). Their reaction to all things is hypersensitive, and, to supplement the vulgar five senses, they develop an imaginary sight, and imaginary hearing, an imaginary sense of smell, an imaginary sense of taste. The pleasures and displeasures brought by sensory stimuli are augmented because of this. Here lies the specificity of what is called Symbolism (OZ, vol. 21, pp. 121-123).102

In this text, aside from presenting the classic theory of the hypersensitivity of the fin de siècle men, Ōgai uses the Japanese term shōchō-ha to equally qualify the Symbolists and the Decadents, both terms being here written in French. Moreover, with its emphasis on the power of imagination, this text also testifies that the interpretation of Symbolism as an aesthetic making visible the invisible did not await the introduction into the Japanese literary circles of Arthur Symons’ influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and his famous definition of Symbolism as ‘a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream’ (Symons, 1980, p. 6). As Calinescu remarks, ‘the elevation of the imaginative power to the detriment of reason’ is an integral part of Decadence (Calinescu, 1987, p. 161), and Baudelaire’s poetry clearly celebrates imagination, ‘that queen of the faculties (cette reine des facultés)’.103 Symons’ book appeared in England the same year Ōgai was publishing his article. The original English version admittedly quickly found its way into Japan, as Kanbara Ariake recalls having read the volume around 1900 that the critic Hasegawa Tenkei had

101 Despite being relatively short-lived, the magazine Mesamashigusa (1896-1902) founded by Ōgai had prestigious contributors such as Kōda Rohan, Ozaki Kōyō, and Ochiai Naobumi. It is also famous for being the first literary magazine to publish a positive review of Takekurabe, the first work of the then unknown young woman writer Higuchi Ichiyō, which launched her fame. 102 「所謂紀季(Fin de siècle)を口にし、象徵派(Symbolists、Décadents)と稱するものは、[...]自然派を以て陳腐憫笑す可きものとなせり。[...] 近人には神經質 Nervositaet あり。物に應ずること過敏にして、尋常の視聽嗅味に繼ぐに、空想視、空想聽、空想嗅、空想味を以てするに至る。官能の接受に隨へる快不快の感はこれが爲めに增盛す。所謂象徵派の特色は蓋し此に存ず。」

57 ordered from abroad, in the first pages of ‘Ariake-shū zengo’ (1929). It was then presented to a larger audience by Sōseki during a cycle of conferences given in February 1908 titled ‘Sōsaku-ka no taido’ (The Attitude of the Writer) (Yanagisawa, 2017, p. 375). Iwano Hōmei then published the first Japanese translation in 1913. Ten years earlier, in 1903, and six years after the word had first appeared under Ueda Bin’s pen, Decadence was already an actively debated topic within the Japanese literary world. Just as had been the case in Europe, Decadence’s fame came mainly from the criticisms it provoked and from the responses these criticisms received.104 In January, Ueda Bin wrote as follows in Myōjō.

Philosophical inquiry, advance of science, problems of religion and politics, [...] how could these not have an impact on the poet? Parnassianism [kōtō-ha] happened, Decadence [taitō-ha] followed, and then Symbolism [shōchō-ha]; the turmoil among the world of poetry does not seem to come to an end. Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, José-Maria de Heredia, Verlaine, Sully Prudhomme, etc, are great writers who represent the recent trends in poetry, and are absolutely worth reading. However, their quality comes from the battles and pains agitating the hearts and minds of the nineteenth century fin de siècle, and their poetry, full of mysterious profundity as well as passion, cannot be explained in one conversation. [...] It is strange how much these feelings echo deeply within the heart of modern men. [...] Contemporary men’s worldviews have nothing crude, and seek subtle shadows, sounds, and scents, so that it is not surprising that they are made up by somehow mystical discourses. It is also natural that they would be mainly inclined to pessimistic sorrow (UBZ, vol. 4, pp. 337-338).105

103 On the anti-realism of Decadence, see Chapter 2. 104 See the Introduction. 105 「哲理の討究、また科学の進歩、政教の難問、[...] なんで詩人に反響がなからうや。『高踏派』 Parnassiens 起り、『頽唐派』Décadents 出で『象徵派』Symbolistes また之を嗣ぎ、詩壇の狂瀾はまだ収らない。ルコント・ドｳ・リイル Leconte de Lisle ボドレエル Baudelaire ホセ・マリヤ・ドｳ・エレディヤ José-Maria de Heredia ヴルレエヌ Verlaine シュリ・プリュドン Suly Prudhomme [sic] 等は、最近の詩風を代表する名家であって、充分精読の価値がある。だだし十九世紀末人心内部生命の奮闘苦悶を閱みしてはじめて味ふべきもので、幽玄もあり狂熱もあり、到底一回の談話につくされない。[...] さればとて、近世人の胸には、それが何となくしみじみと感じるのが不思議である。[...] なにしろ今人の世界観は粗大でない、微妙な陰や音や香をを尋ねてゐるのであるから、一方に神秘説のでるのも当然である。またおほむね厭世悲哀の観にかたむいてゐるのも怪しくない。」「仏蘭西近代の詩歌」

58 This seems to be one of the earliest instances where instead of the loanword dekadan, a Japanese term is used to qualify the aesthetic, beside shōchō-ha, Symbolism: taitō- ha, taitō meaning corruption in both a physical and moral way, an absence of vigour, a weakened, crumbling state of decay. We notice that Bin seems first to imply a linear succession from Parnassianism to Decadence, referred to as taitō, to Symbolism, while he incudes the three within the fin de siècle reaction to modernity we call Decadence. Taitō-ha may thus have the same semantic instability as Decadence often has in the West: either or both a limited transitory movement leading to Symbolism, and/or the general aesthetics of the fin de siècle. Furthermore, Ueda Bin employs the same rhetoric as the French Decadents (in the wide acceptance of the term) presented in the Introduction of this thesis, that is to say he justifies Decadence out of the historical and cultural context. It is important to notice that in the way Ueda Bin phrases this text, there seems to be no doubt as whether Japanese themselves are concerned by this fin de siècle melancholy. When he writes that Symbolist poetry ‘echoes deeply within the heart of modern men’, he seems to be referring to the contemporary Japanese readers. The hypersensitivity of the ‘contemporary men’ is therefore afflicting the Japanese and the European alike. This article is followed by many discussions on Decadence, beginning with the article ‘Dekadan-ron’ (Theory of Decadence) published the same year in Teikoku bungaku by the English literature scholar Andō Katsuichirō (安藤勝一郎, 1879- 1962), under the pseudonym Mushoshi 無書子 . 106 Here again, Decadence is apprehended as an all-compassing phenomenon, as ‘a page of the history of the human mind that evolves with the times’ (Tōyama, 2010, p. 372), touching upon the aesthetics of the Parnassians and the Symbolists but also of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ibsen, Huysmans, D’Annunzio, or Wilde. Andō understands Decadence as a revolt against rationality and materialism: ‘Decadent mysticism [...] exists next to an idealism, which relies on an exclusively suggestive poetry that refuses nature’s materiality’ (Tōyama, 2010, p. 372).107

106 The original title was ‘Dekanda-ron’ (デカンダ論), which is ‘obviously a typo’ according to Tōyama (2010, p. 371); without reading too much into this, it may be a sign that the word was still unfamiliar to the Japanese public at the time. In his text, Andō uses the term ‘Décadents’ in French. 107 「[...] デカダン神秘主義 [...] はその自然の實質を拒みて唯暗示風韻を把持すべき理想的の邊に在て存す。」

59 This article is thus inscribed within the same attitude towards Decadence as Bin’s. Its literary significance is underlined, it is understood as a reaction to a specific historical context, and its main paradigms (pessimism, anti-materialism, idealism, mysticism...) are well identified. The tone is laudatory at times, and generally neutral. This is not always the case with the articles that followed. From June to September and in December 1905, the German literature scholar Katayama Koson 片山孤村 (real name Masao 正雄, 1879-1933) published two articles titled ‘Shinkeishitsu no bungaku’ and ‘Zoku shinkeishitsu no bungaku’ (Literature of Nervosity and Literature of Nervosity Continued). Koson’s texts are representative of the way the theory of Decadence developed through controversies; they furthermore illustrate how a hostile attitude to Decadence does not hinder a real understanding of the phenomenon. Koson indeed writes in the July issue:

Things that bring pleasure to ordinary healthy bodies have no effect on these sick people; they are therefore compelled to rely on the world of imagination, and eventually find a way out through imagination. This way out manifests itself in the way colours are felt [rather than seen], and red, green, blue, purple, red, white, etc. all become symbols of a deep tragedy (tragisch); thoughts, feelings, scents, and tastes become coloured, and green coloured songs, blue coloured sensations, blood-red thoughts, colours that ring and feelings that sound finally arise, in a great confusion of concepts and sensations. [...] For instance, for these sufferers, it seems that vowels have colours: A is black, E is white, I is red, U is green, O is blue (Tōyama, 2010, pp. 375-376).108

Koson is obviously here evoking Rimbaud. His poem ‘Voyelles’ had been taken as a target in France as well, denounced for example by the Parnassian François Coppée — presented and translated in Kaichōon — as the archetype of the absurdities Symbolism could lead to (Degott, 1996, p. 107).

108 「通例の健康體に快感を與へるものは、これ等の病人には少つとも効力が無いので、已むを得ず空想界に走つて、漸く活路を見付け出した。この活路とは即ち色彩の感覺で、赤、綠、靑、紫、黑、白等トラーギッシュは皆深刻な悲壮の記號となり、思想も感情も嗅覺も味覺も皆色から出來上つて、綠色の歌、靑色の感覺、血紅色の思想、さては響く色や鳴る感情が出來て、槪念も感覺もごつちやまぜになつた。 [...] なほ詳しく言ふと、これらの患者のためには、母音には色が有るさうだ。例へば A は黑、E は白、I は赤、 U は綠、O は靑で有る。」

60 It is interesting to notice that Rimbaud becomes a major influence on the Japanese literary world only from the 1930s, with Nakahara Chūya’s translations and Kobayashi Hideo’s essays. Koson mentioning the ‘Voyelles’ poem in 1905 is one more example of the way literary works travel through means much less direct than translation per se and affect other literatures by undergoing interpretation, mediation, and diffraction. Just like Ueda Bin and Andō Katsuichirō, Koson sees Decadence transcends genres and movements:

Because these writers use symbols to express their thoughts and feelings, they are called Symbolists [shōchō-ha](Symbolistes), because they are slaves to the impressions coming to them from the outside world they are called Impressionists [inshō-ha](Impressionistes) [sic], and, because, as sufferers of neurasthenia, their moral sense has been anesthetised and they cannot escape ‘decay and corruption’ [fuhai daraku], they call themselves ‘Decadents’ [dekadan](Décadents) and see the cause of this in the époque [...] (Tōyama, 2010, p. 376).109

Koson combines two Japanese words to refer to the French term Décadence: fuhai, meaning physical decay, decomposition, rot, and daraku, meaning moral corruption, depravity, or fall (in the Christian sense of the word). Moreover, Koson explains Decadence as the symptom of an undesirable malady: ‘are not these poets actually suffering from an illness of the nerves?’ (Tanaka J., 1957, p. 40).110 Even though Koson does not here quote him by name, Max Nordau had famously put forward this interpretation of Decadence as an illness in his 1892 essay Entartung (Degeneration), and Nordau’s theories were known to the Japanese

109 「此等の文學者は其思想や感情を發表するに記號(象徵)を用ひるから「象徵派」(Symbolistes)と稱し、外界から來る印象の奴隷となつて居るから「印象派」(Impressionistes)と稱し、神經衰弱の患者の常として道德的意思が全く痲痺して居るから、到底「腐敗堕落」の人たることを免れぬ所よりして、自稱して「デカダン」(Décadents)と云ひ其源因を [...] 時代に歸して居る。」 110 「彼らは実に神経病者若くは神経病を佯る詩人ではないか。」

61 writers and critics of the time.111 An article by the critic and writer Nakajima Kotō (中島孤島 1878-1946) published in seven installments from September to November of the same year in Yomiuri shinbun, titled ‘Ankoku-naru bundan’ (The literary World of Darkness), indeed presents Nordau’s essay on Decadence in detail; Kotō follows Nordau in presenting Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé as representatives of the sufferers of the ‘mystic illness that erodes the heart of the fin de siècle men’ (Tōyama, 2010, p. 379).112 Kaichōon’s Introduction, published in October 1905, bears the marks of these articles and debates. Ueda Bin indeed writes:

The introduction of symbolic poetry in the Japanese poetic world is still shallow, but I hear early rumours, albeit scarce, in some corners of our poetic world. You critics, who blame the symbolic poets for boasting about the acuteness of their nerves, would you not say that your own nerves are indeed displaying hypersensitivity? [...] To this day, European criticism itself is not devoid of conservative voices (UBZ, vol. 1, p. 26).113

The Japanese texts on Decadence thus inherit the critical disagreements and controversies surrounding the notion in Europe. Along with the writings of Nordau and Symons, Paul Bourget’s essay on Baudelaire, which became in France landmarks of the theory of Decadence, seems to have been well known. The essay ‘Essai de psychologie contemporaine : Charles Baudelaire’, first published in 1881 in La Nouvelle revue, remains famous for articulating the transmutation of physical and spiritual weakness into artistic strength.

111 Nordau was first presented in Japan in 1902 by the critic Hasegawa Tenkei (長谷川天溪, 1876- 1940) in Waseda gakuhō, in an article that sums up Nordau’s biography and translates the table of contents of Entartung; a full translation of this latter book only appeared in 1914 under the title Gendai no daraku (The Decadence of the Present), with a foreword by Tsubouchi Shōyō. Masamune Hakuchō translated Nordau’s novel Paradoxe in 1906 (Pitarch Fernández, 2015, p. 29). Hasegawa Tenkei published an article in Taiyō in December 1905 entitled ‘Shōchō-shugi no bungaku’ (Symbolist Literature) that Tanaka Jun lists as an important contribution to the debate on Decadence that happened in 1903-1905 (Tanaka J., 1957, p. 36). 112 「世紀末の人心を浸蝕せる神秘病」

62 The great argument against decadence is that it knows no tomorrow and in the end is always destroyed by barbarity. But is it not the fate of the exquisite and the rare always to be in the wrong in the face of brutality? One is entitled to acknowledge this kind of wrong and to prefer the defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of violent Macedonia (Bourget, 1885, p. 28).114

As Tanaka Takuzō (2011) has argued, Bourget was not widely read in Japanese until the Second World War.115 However, he had been presented in articles by Ueda Bin (‘Furansu bungaku no kenkyū’, 1897) and by Nagai Kafū (‘Furansu gendai no shōsetsuka’, 1909). Furthermore, the French professor Emile Louis Heck (1866-1943), teaching at Tokyo Imperial University from 1891 to 1921, had mentioned him in his lectures; Heck was a notorious conservative who, while fustigating the French Enlightenment, praised writers such as Bourget, Barrès, and Péguy for ‘maintaining the best of French tradition’ (Tanaka T., 2011, pp. 294- 295).116 This Bourget was not the same as the one who wrote the 1881 essay on Decadence, as the writer had undergone a shift towards Catholicism and traditionalism around 1901 (Fougère and Sangsue, 2005, p. 8). However, his text on Decadence had been presented in Japan, mainly by the scholar of French literature Gotō Sueo (後藤末雄, 1886-1967) in an article titled ‘Dekadan no riron’ (Theory of Decadence), published in Subaru in July 1911. Echoes of his approach to Decadence can further be found in Satō Haruo’s 1922 article ‘Dekadan ni taisuru awatadashii ichi kōsatsu’ (A Hurried Observation on the Decadent, Junsei bijutsu), when the author wrote:

113 「日本詩壇に於ける象徴詩の伝来、日なほ浅く、作未だ多からざるに当て、既に早く評壇の一隅に囁々の語を為す者ありと聞く。象徴派の詩人を目して徒らに神経の鋭きに傲る者なりと非議する評家よ、卿等の神経こそ寧ろ過敏の徴候を呈したらずや。[...] 欧洲の評壇また今に保守の論を唱ふる者無きにあらず。」 114 ‘Le grand argument contre les décadences, c’est qu’elles n’ont pas de lendemain et que toujours une barbarie écrase. Mais n’est-ce pas comme le lot fatal de l’exquis et du rare d’avoir tort devant la brutalité ? On est en droit d’avouer un tort de cette sorte et de préférer la défaite d’Athènes en décadence au triomphe du Macédonien violent’. 115 Bourget’s novel Le Sens de la mort (1915) became a best seller after its publication in Japanese in 1939 in a loose translation by Hirose Tetsushi (1883-1952); subsequently, many translations of Bourget’s novels appeared in 1940-1942 (Tanaka T., 2011, p. 293). Its success may be explained by the way Bourget develops in this novel a meditation on death and loss within a narration exalting patriotism and traditionalism (Tanaka T., 2011, pp. 297-298). 116 「仏蘭西の最も卓れた伝統を感得[している。]」

63 What is Decadent? It is what is not healthy. That which is ill in its very life. And it is in illness that we often find sparkles of something superior to health. In the criminal and the insane we can see how the truth of humanity is openly magnified and manifested, even if it’s only one side of it. [...] The true Decadence is in the phosphorescence that a rotten spirit emits (SHZ, vol. 11, pp. 340-241).117

One key-text of French Decadence that seems to have been relatively neglected within the Japanese Decadent landscape is Huysmans’ A Rebours, famously dubbed in 1908 ‘the breviary of decadence’ by Arthur Symons. The novel was not translated into Japanese until 1962, by the scholar of French literature and writer Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (澁澤龍彦, 1928-1987). Huysmans is not totally absent from the writings of the prominent Francophiles we have been following; according to Kubota Han’ya, Ueda Bin was the first to mention Huysmans, in one of his columns ‘Kaigai zōdan’ in Teikoku bungaku mentioned above, in June 1895 (Kubota, 1979, p. 622). Bin presents Huysmans’ career concisely, noting that he was both influenced by Zola and Baudelaire (UBZ, vol. 3, pp. 269-271); he furthermore positions Huysmans within a genealogy of writers comprising Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Poe, and Villiers de L’Iisle-Adam (UBZ, vol. 3, pp. 272-273). Bin thus writes that Huysmans represents the ‘unhealthy thought (fukenzen-sō)’ that is prevalent in Europe and is inspired by the spirit of the late Roman Empire — ‘Rōma suitai no bungaku (Décadence latine)’ (UBZ, vol. 3, p. 268). Bin must have been especially struck by Huysmans’ return to Catholicism and Des Esseintes’ existential longing for religious belief, as he exclusively quotes in his short article lines from A Rebours and En Route dealing with issues of faith and God. He ends his short article by writing that two texts have theorised ‘Décadence’, Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine and Théophile Gautier’s Rapport sur les progrès de la poésie.

117 「デカダンとは何であるか。健全でないものである。人生そのものの病気である。さうして病気のなかには、しばしば健全以上のものが閃いてゐる。犯罪人や発狂者などのなかには、ほんの一面的にではあるが人間性の真質が露骨に拡大されて現はれてゐることが絶えずある。[...] 霊がくさってしまって燐光を放ってゐる。−–これが本当のデカダンである。」Translation by P. Pitarch Fernandez (2015, p. 174).

64 This shows that Bin had, unsurprisingly for someone with such an erudite knowledge of French literature, a good understanding of the topic, but these columns in Teikoku bungaku did not offer space for great detail. After Ueda Bin, Huysmans seems to be mentioned in Japanese literary magazines from time to time, but also briefly, for instance in 1908 by Kafū in the newspaper Kokumin shinbun, where he writes about his emotion upon reading À vau-l’eau (which is misspelled ‘A veau d’eau’) (KZ, vol. 6, p. 297). Is it possible to explain this relative lack of interest by the fact that Huysmans’ writings, his style being a realistic prose, are more difficult to categorise? They seem indeed to bridge the gap between Naturalism and Aestheticism, when the Decadent movement in principle developed from a strong opposition, both aesthetical and ideological, to Naturalism. The Japanese literary world was itself strongly affected by the controversies surrounding shizenshugi, the Japanese take on Naturalism, and the Decadents occupied a complex position towards this categorisation. In the following chapter, I will focus on the way the Japanese Decadent milieu took shape around an openly anti-Naturalist stance and a re-exploration, in life and art, of Aestheticism.

65 CHAPTER TWO Translating Art and Life: Japanese Aestheticism and Decadence.

In his essay ‘La Reine des facultés’ (Salon de 1859, ch. 3), Baudelaire turns the critique of realism upside down by accusing the realist writers of his time of being unfaithful to men’s true nature.

These days, we hear the same thing uttered again and again in a thousand different ways: ‘Copy nature; copy only nature. There is no bigger pleasure nor more beautiful triumph than in an excellent copy of nature.’ This doctrine, enemy of the art, pretends to be applied not only to painting, but also to all arts, even the novel, even poetry. [...] The true artist, the true poet, should only paint according to what he sees and what he feels. He must be truly faithful to his own nature. He must avoid like the plague borrowing the eyes and the feelings of another man, however great he may be; because if he does so, his productions would be only lies about who he is, and not realities. If the pedants I am referring to do not mean this, I believe they are simply saying: ‘We have no imagination, and we declare that no one should have any.’ (Baudelaire, 1962, pp. 320-321)118

This argument hints at the complex attitude of Decadence towards realism. It is not so much realism as an aesthetic or as a literary style that the Decadents reject; they diverge on the very nature of reality itself, and on the appropriate artistic means to capture it. Is the best way to be true to the real by abstracting the subjective, as realists claim, or on the contrary by focusing on the individual mind? This paradigm, which will be carried on into modernism, holds deep implications on both the aesthetic and

118 ‘Dans ces derniers temps nous avons entendu dire de mille manières différentes: « Copiez la nature ; ne copiez que la nature. Il n’y a pas de plus grande jouissance ni de plus beau triomphe qu’une copie excellente de la nature». Et cette doctrine, ennemie de l’art, prétendait être appliquée non seulement à la peinture, mais à tous les arts, même au roman, même à la poésie. […] L’artiste, le vrai artiste, le vrai poète, ne doit peindre que selon qu’il voit et qu’il sent. Il doit être réellement fidèle à sa propre nature. Il doit éviter comme la mort d’emprunter les yeux et les sentiments d’un autre homme, si grand qu’il soit ; car alors les productions qu’il nous donnerait seraient, relativement à lui, des mensonges, et non des réalités. Or, si les pédants dont je parle […] ne voulaient pas que la chose fût entendue ainsi, croyons simplement qu’ils voulaient dire : « Nous n’avons pas d’imagination, et nous décrétons que personne n’en aura »’.

66 the ideological levels. It is linked with the way the Decadent worldview is necessarily relativist: just as civilisations can be full of vigour one day and decaying the next, one man’s reality is not the same as the other’s. This vision in itself participates in Decadence’s pessimism, as it dismisses the relevance of a scientifically knowable, objective reality for men’s existential needs, and entails a fundamental suspicion towards any movements or ideologies that claim to rely on the strength of the community rather than the isolated individual. Baudelaire’s critique thus comes from a very different place than the one most commonly found in nineteenth century Europe, which consisted of accusing realist writers of immorality, lewdness, and/or obscenity. It is thus highly significant that the volume of symbolist poetry Les Fleurs du mal and the realist novel Madame Bovary were famously put on trial the same year — 1857 —, by the same tribunal, both authors accused of ‘insults against public and religious morals and common decency (outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs)’; both works were ultimately censored but only Baudelaire was condemned to pay a fine. This simple fact shows how, in the words of David Weir, the ‘pitting of the scientific Naturalist against the artistic decadent is rather too facile when we consider that an attitude of pessimism and a preoccupation with decay or decline are common to both’ (Weir, 1995, p. 44). Naturalism and Decadence alike can be seen as a reaction to technological and scientific innovation, positivist thought, and the progress of democracy. These similar core preoccupations allow for an array of different attitudes and positions that do not fall neatly into distinct movements or categories. Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers are simultaneously proponents of realism and Aestheticism; so is, as we shall see, Nagai Kafū. How then to identify Decadence when it is spread over various styles and genres? As I have argued in the introduction, I do not believe that a thematic focus on degeneration and decay is the main hallmark of Decadence. In this chapter, I argue that Decadence’s specificity can be understood as essentially existential, in the way its aesthetic ensues from a specific vision of the truth of the human existence that relies on two general pillars: individualism and antimaterialism. In the first part of the chapter, I will show how the debates surrounding Naturalism and its Japanese translation, shizenshugi, allows for an understanding of the Decadent’s quest for individualism. In the second part of the chapter, I will analyse how Aestheticism within Decadence is inflected to signify a fundamental revolt against modern society.

67 1. Against Naturalism? Decadent Individualism

Decadence is often perceived as being against Naturalism, and Nagai Kafū, along with the Myōjō poets and their inspiration Mori Ōgai and Ueda Bin, are classified as ‘anti-Naturalists’. However, this classification needs to be put into question as what ‘Naturalism’ exactly stands for is not much clearer than Decadence itself. Ōgai and Bin did certainly resist when it was all the rage in the Japanese literary world. In 1889, Ōgai — a successful army surgeon by trade — published a series of articles denouncing the use of ‘analysis (bunseki)’ and ‘dissection (kaibō)’ in literature, arguing that it should on the contrary be based on ‘the strength of the imagination (kūsō no chikara)’ (Seita, 2007, p. 137). Ueda Bin attacked Zola and Naturalism in the influential essay mentioned in the previous chapter, ‘Furansu bungaku no kenkyū’ (Studies on French Literature, 1897); he is as clear as can be: ‘I have been an opponent of the Naturalism preached by Zola and his school since the very beginning’, he writes (Seita, 2007, p. 142).119 In ‘Bungaku to shizen to’ (Literature and Nature, 1889), published in the popular general news magazine Kokumin no tomo (The People’s Friend), Mori Ōgai develops the following argument.

To begin with, conscious thought dwells in the mind, while unconscious thought dwells in nature. Beauty sleeps in nature and awakens in the mind. We call imagination the place where, in the mind, beauty soars. [...] The poet in his text transcribes imagination into imagination. Therefore, there is a part of manufacturing in art. Beauty escapes nature and becomes the beauty of art by being manufactured (OZ, vol. 22, pp. 13-14).120

Ōgai, strongly influenced by German Idealism, argues that the ‘I’ is the source of the world’s intelligibility. The way we consciously perceive the world is already shaped by the mind’s ability for imagination, therefore, art is a product of our imagination;

119「余は始めよりゾラ一派の唱導する自然主義に反対なり。」 120「夫れ有意識の想は精神なり。無意識の想は自然なり。美は自然に眠りて精神に醒む。美の精神中に喚発する処を空想とす。[...] 唯詩人は文を籍りて空想より空想に写すものなり。かるがゆゑに美術には製造あり。美は製造せられたるための美術の美となりて、自然の美を脱す。」

68 superior art manages to exploit all the strength of the imagination to best express the working of the mind. Thus, art without artificiality is an aberration. This plea in favour of artificiality is central to the Decadent aesthetic, and, as Alfred Carter has argued, marks the point where Decadence diverges from romanticism: ‘Artificiality [...] is the chief characteristic of decadence as the nineteenth century understood the word. By voluntary contradiction of the nature-cult, writers were able to see all the traditional Romantic themes in a new light and a new perspective’ (Carter, 1978, p. 25). What David Weir calls Decadence’s ‘anti-mimetic stance’ (Weir, 1995, p. 16) rests on the assumption that language’s poetic capacities, as opposed to its mimetic ones, bring out the true human experience. In his essay on Baudelaire (1868), Théophile Gautier justifies the artificiality of the ‘style of decadence’ from a historical perspective: ‘[It] is the necessary and fatal language of populations and civilisations for which artificial life has replaced natural life and has developed in men unknown urges (Tel est bien l’idiome nécessaire et fatal des peuples et des civilisations où la vie factice a remplacée la vie naturelle et développée chez l’homme des besoins inconnus)’ (Gautier, 1978, p. 171). Twenty years later, Oscar Wilde made his famous argumentation in favour of artificiality from an aesthetical perspective, declaring in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891) that it is only by freeing himself from the ‘dull facts’ that the artist can achieve beauty; just like a ‘fine lie’, art is ‘simply that which is its own evidence’ (Wilde, 2007, p. 321). The common ground for these arguments can indeed to be found in the ‘Art for art’s sake’ philosophy, articulated by Gautier in the 1835 preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, which embraces a realist aesthetic. It claims that art should not be tied to utilitarian or didactic functions, and be independent from social, moral, and religious norms. It would thus be a mistake to exclude Naturalism all together from this school of thought. As Flaubert and Baudelaire’s simultaneous trials for obscenity clearly show, both authors strongly believed in the necessary amorality of artistic appreciation. It is Flaubert who declared that ‘What I think beautiful, what I would like to do, is a book on nothing, a book with no exterior attachments, which would stand on its own through the internal strength of its style (Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-même par la force interne de son style)’ (Letter to Louise Collet, 16 January 1852; Flaubert, 1921, vol. 2, p. 70).

69 The ‘pitting of the scientific naturalist against the artistic decadent’ can thus be interpreted as stemming more from a misunderstanding of Naturalism rather than from a real difference in the two aesthetics’ approach to art. Zola, who was classically presented as the ‘novelist of transparency (romancier de la transparence)’ (Hamon, 1968, pp. 385-391), has been re-evaluated as a writer who places the opacity of the real at the centre of his preoccupations, ‘never fooled by the aporia of mimesis within language (jamais dupe de l’aporie de la mimesis par le langage)’ (Piton-Foucault, 2015, p. 40; see also Grépat, 2016). In his correspondence, Zola repeatedly writes that ‘exact reality is impossible within a work of art (la réalité exacte est donc impossible dans une œuvre d’art)’ (Zola, 1978, p. 375) and claims that every writer uses a ‘screen’ through which he represents the world, his being the ‘realist screen (l’écran réaliste)’; he adds that the ‘realist screen’ ‘needs to have specific properties that distort images and that, consequently, turn these images into works of art (doit avoir en lui des propriétés particulières qui déforment les images, et qui, par conséquent, font de ces images des œuvres d’art)’ (Letter to Antony Valabrègue, 18 August 1864; Zola, 1978, pp. 379-380). All these authors shared the common belief that authenticity in art lies within its independence from reality: it is only by recreating reality — be it through a realist aesthetic or not — that art manages to be true. In Japan around 1900, ‘The word zoraisumu (Zolaism) was a kind of slogan: one needed to focus on the man, not on nature, and try and describe him “as he was”, in all his cruelty and weakness. (le mot zoraisumu (zolaïsme) était une sorte de slogan : il faut s’attacher à l’homme, non à la nature, et le décrire “tel qu’il est”, dans sa cruauté et dans sa faiblesse)’ (Origas, 2009, p. 339). Within the Japanese literary world, Naturalism or shizenshugi is shaped around ‘misunderstandings’ of the French literary movement (Hijiya-Kirschnereit, 1996, pp. 37-39) or, depending on the viewpoint, a ‘beautiful misinterpretation’, as Philippe Forest puts it (Forest, 2003, p. 28).121 Shizenshugi came to rely on the idea that the more intimate and the more pitiful the author’s revelations sound, the more truthful the novel appears. Shizenshugi thus gave birth to the type of fictions retrospectively called I-Novels, where truthfulness is supposed to be guaranteed by the ‘single-voiced, “direct” expression of

70 the author’s “self”’ and by a ‘written language [that] is “transparent”’ (Fowler, 1988, p. 6). This infatuation with transparency had been prepared by years of theoretical debates equating modernity in literature with the absence of artifice. Tsubouchi Shōyō’s seminal essay Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885-1886), largely held as marking the beginnings of a modern approach to literature in Japan, was an ode to realism (shajitsushugi) conceived as the objective, rational description of the human physical and psychological life; it was also a criticism of Edo fiction, dismissed as un-authentic, sentimental, sensationalist, and/or immoral.122 In 1891, Shōyō, who was also a professor at Waseda University, had created the magazine Waseda bungaku, which presented Western literature to Japanese audiences and championed a liberal ideology inspired by the Enlightenment. The magazine, which had ceased to appear from 1898, was re-launched in 1906 as the mouthpiece of Japanese Naturalism, mainly under the input of the writer, critic and journalist Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871-1918), who had just come back from studying in London and Berlin. When the word shizenshugi was thus put on the foreground of the Japanese literary scene in September 1907 with the succès de scandale of Tayama Katai’s Futon (The Quilt), the poets affiliated with the magazine Myōjō responded by violently attacking all things Naturalist. 123 Tekkan wrote in the December issue: ‘Literary world [...], look! The bad writing of Naturalist novels, which flatters the conventional taste by stirring sexual desire and drawing out cheap tears, is inundating the city!’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 72).124 The younger members of the Shinshisha were

121 The word shizenshugi appears in 1889, ‘first used by Mori Ōgai’; ‘it was originally applied vaguely and indiscriminately to various works by writers who were not necessarily followers of European naturalism. Therefore, by 1897, [...] it denoted merely an objective, realistic tendency. Only later woulf shizenshugi become the established term used to refer to the literary movement introduced from Europe and represented in particular by Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers’ (Hijiya- Kirschnereit, 1996, p. 21). 122 As Edward Seidensticker writes, ‘efforts to throw off the didacticism, the eroticism, and the excessive decoration of late Tokugawa fiction became a concerted literary movement at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War; [...] its more active participants, self-appointed disciples of Zola, turned in their quest for unadorned, impersonal truth to their own experience’ (Seidensticker, 1965, p. 13). 123 The same year as Futon, Shimazaki Tōson published Hakai (The Broken Commandment), which ‘illustrates the fact that Japanese naturalism had already reached a crossroads, combining as it does two features which were subsequently to diverge again: the socio-critical and the confessional aspect. Due to the success [...] of [...] Futon, the egocentric, private element became dominant and characterized the entire subsequent literary development of the genre’ (Hijiya-Kirschnereit, 1996, p. 25). See also Karatani Kōjin (1993, ch. 3). 124 「文壇、[...] 見よ、性欲の挑発と、安価なる涙とを以て流俗に媚ぶる、謂ゆる自然派の悪文小説は市を満つ。」

71 gleefully participating in Myōjō’s attack on the Naturalist school represented by Waseda bungaku. In October 1907, Kitahara Hakushū and Yoshii Isamu each published a poem written in alphabet mocking the stern seriousness of the ‘Waseda school (Waseda-ha)’. Yoshii’s, ironically entitled ‘FUTON’, reads:

They show their half-awake faces [...] In the city in the middle of the summer Holding flags with ‘Naturalist school’ written on them All looking very solemn [...] Wearing ‘the quilt’ even though it’s so hot! (Yamada, 2015, pp. 72-73)125

However, in December 1909, most of the young poets linked to Myōjō left Yosano Tekkan’s Shinshisha to create their own magazine, Subaru (The Pleiades). The name, suggested by Mori Ōgai, was inspired by the short-lived French language magazine co-founded by Maurice Maeterlinck with Rodolphe Darzens in the late 1880s, La Pléiade (Noda, 1976, p. 116; Yamada, 2015, p. 69). The main editors and contributors were Kitahara Hakushū, Kinoshita Mokutarō, Yoshii Isamu, Hirano Banri, and Ishikawa Takuboku. Despite the fact that Subaru can easily be considered as the direct heir of Myōjō — pursuing the work of introducing, translating and adapting European poetry, literature, and art that Tekkan’s magazine had been undertaking since 1900 —, the reasons why these young poets felt the need to distance themselves from the Yosanos are highly relevant for understanding the ambivalent position of Decadence towards Naturalism. Despite the taunting against the Waseda group, which had as much to do with clique rivalry as with literature, the poets of Subaru had a more nuanced position towards Naturalism than their master Tekkan (Noda, 1976, p. 109). As Kinoshita Mokutarō wrote several years later:

Our disposition was not entirely anti-Naturalist. We certainly were against Waseda, against [Tayama] Katai, against [Masamune] Hakuchō, but in

125 「夏の真昼の街中を / 「自然派」と書く旗をたて、/ みな深刻な顔あげて / [...] この暑いのに「蒲団」きて、/ [...] 寝ぼけ顔」Japanese transcription by Yamada Toyoko.

72 favour of the literary and artistic Naturalism of the West (Yamada, 2015, p. 70).126

From 1910 onwards, Keiō University became the epicentre of this anti- shinzenshugi reaction, when Ueda Bin and Mori Ōgai — who had been teaching aesthetics (shinbigaku) there from 1892 — were asked by the then secretary general Ishida Shintarō (1870-1927) to help rejuvenate the university’s department of letters, which was suffering from Waseda’s hegemony in the literary world (Kawamori, 1992, p. 1; Miyagi, 1976, pp. 220-221). Ōgai and Bin suggested that the University hire Nagai Kafū, whose reputation as an expert in Western literature was uncontested after his long stay abroad and who was enjoying a paradoxical success after his volume Furansu monogatari (French Stories, 1909) had been banned by the authorities.127 Kafū, but also Ueda Bin and Mori Ōgai, despite their opposition to Zola, were by no means staunch anti-Naturalists; they were more specifically denouncing the gap between European Naturalism and Japanese shinzenshugi, which they deemed inferior. Bin stated this very clearly in a 1907 article, ‘Ōshū ni okeru shizenshugi’ (Naturalism in Europe). Bin starts by stating his surprise at the Japanese usage of the word, the definition of which in the Japanese literary world appears to him ‘obscure (bakuzen toshita)’. He then undertakes the task to contextualise Naturalism within the literary history of nineteenth century Europe, retracing its origin to the realist reaction to romanticism in the middle of the century. In a demonstration remarkable for its clarity and concision, Bin links Naturalism’s raison d’être to the changes provoked by the advance of modern sciences. He notes how Naturalism has a highly pessimistic vision of the modern man:

There is a tendency in the writings of Naturalist authors to negate men’s freedom of will. Many illustrate how under the force of heredity,

126 「[我々]の心持は全然反自然主義的といふのではなかった。それは反早稲田、反花袋、反白鳥ではあったが、西洋の文学及び芸術上の自然主義には寧ろ同情してゐた。」The reasons for the split between the Yosanos and the poets of Subaru were also personal; see Noda, 1976, pp. 89-90. It is also important to underline that the poets of Subaru never disowned Yosano Tekkan as their spiritual father (alongside Mori Ōgai and Ueda Bin) (Noda, 1976, pp. 92-93).

73 circumstances, or surroundings, individuals tend to be controlled and transformed. Because of this, they end up illustrating not only life’s bright sides but also its darker ones, and describing without any reserve the animalistic along the rational in men (UBZ, vol. 6, p. 169).128

From there, Bin narrowly links writers such as Huysmans, Bourget, and Pierre Loti, to Zola, as ‘they, having gone to the extremes of Naturalism, voiced the rebellion that men feel in their hearts against the fundamental idea that negates their freedom of will’ (UBZ, vol. 6, p. 169);129 Decadence is thus viewed by Ueda Bin as a prolongation of Naturalism, albeit a paradoxical one.130 He ends by calling for either a clarification of the concept of shizenshugi or for its abandonment in the Japanese literary world, as the way it is used there lies on a ‘misunderstanding (gokai)’ of the European term. Huysmans indeed appears as the most obvious link between Naturalism and Decadence. Kafū dedicates a paragraph to the French author in his famous essay published in 1911 in Mita bungaku, ‘Furansu no shizenshugi to sono hankō’ (French Naturalism and the Reaction Against It). He underlines Huysmans’ status as a disciple of Zola and sees in Huysmans’ early Naturalist works the seed for the fascination with the morbid that ‘Décadentisme’ (written in Roman alphabet) is centered on. He concludes as follows: ‘Huysmans, through the character Des Esseintes, became a radical decadent [dekadan in katakana]’ (KZ, vol. 9, p. 200).131

127 The reason why Furansu monogatari in particular was banned is unclear, as ‘the sexual content [...] is no more explicit than of Amrika monogatari, and the critique against Meiji Japan may be seen as a continuation of that in stories such as Ichigatsu ichijitsu’. ‘Looking at the collection as a whole, however, Meiji authorities may have been most uncomfortable with Kafū’s general attitude toward war, patriotism, and the nation-state’. Thus, ‘the banning of the work certainly contributed to Kafū’s persona and reputation as an oppositional writer’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 60). 128 「此の故に自然主義の作家の書いたものは、人間の自由意思を否定する傾向がある。遺伝とか境遇とか周囲とか云ふものの勢力のもとに、個人が爲めに翻弄せられ変化せらるる傾向を写したものが多い。然うなって来ると、如何にしても、人生の光明面ばかりでなく、暗黒面をも文芸の上に書きあらはさうとするに至り、また、人間の理性のみならず、動物的なども忌憚なく書き顕はすに至った。」 129「此等は皆自然主義の極端に走り、特に人間の自由意思を否定せる根本思想に反抗せる人間の中心の聲が顕はれたものである。」 130 Huysmans himself understood his aesthetic in a similar way. In the 1903 ‘Préface’ of À Rebours, Huysmans writes: ‘It is certain that À Rebours was breaking with my previous [novels], with Les Soeurs Vatard, En ménage, À vau l’eau [...]. Zola saw this. [...] One afternoon as we were having a walk together in the countryside, he suddenly stopped and, his expression darker, he reproached me for writing the book, saying that I was dealing a terrible blow to naturalism, that I was deviating from the school (Ce qui est, en tout cas, certain, c’est qu’À Rebours rompait avec les précédents, avec Les Soeurs Vatard, En ménage, À vau l’eau [...]. Zola le sentit bien. [...] Une après-midi que nous nous promenions, tous les deux, dans la campagne, il s’arrêta brusquement et, l’œil devenu noir, il me reprocha le livre, disant que je portais un coup terrible au naturalisme, que je faisais dévier l’école [...])’ (Huysmans, 1884, p. xviii). 131 「ユイスマンは其の小説の主人公たる Des Esseintes の名の下に極端なるデカダンとな[った。]」

74 Just like Huysmans, Kafū had started his own literary career as a Naturalist writer. Among his first works are two Naturalist novels, Jigoku no hana (The Flowers of Hell, 1902) that Kafū had written at only 23, and an adaptation, or ‘summary- translation’ according to Rachael Hutchinson (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 4), of Zola’s Nana, published as Joyū Nana (The Actress Nana, 1903). However, as Rachael Hutchinson argues,

Kafū’s European style of naturalism did not fit well with the contemporary Japanese literary establishment (or bundan). As Nakamura Mitsuo observes, Kafū was overseas when Japanese literature experienced its own naturalist movement, called shizenshugi. This style of writing tended toward self-absorbed confession, which was not a significant theme in Kafū’s work at the time. As he did not see literature as a medium for opening one’s true self to the world, Kafū’s views set him apart from the popular shizenshugi writers, and so Kafū was classed as an “antinaturalist” even though his style was much closer to so-called “pure” European naturalism (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 4).132

This classic interpretation of Kafū’s position towards Naturalism as unique within the Japanese literary world needs to be nuanced in view of Ueda Bin’s essay and Kinoshita Mokutarō’s declaration quoted above; as Kafū’s popularity at Keiō also illustrates, there was no shortage of similarly-minded young authors within the Japanese literary world of the time. From April 1910, Kafū was put in charge of teaching literary criticism (bungaku hyōron), French language, and French literature; it was the first time in the history of Japanese universities that a specialisation in French was offered in a department of literature (Kawamori, 1992, p. 2). 133 Appointing this excitingly eccentric, cosmopolitan and sophisticated young professor proved to be a successful move for Keiō; Kafū’s reputation immediately attracted young bright students, such

132 See also Seidensticker: ‘Kafū [...] produce[d] fiction that would probably have been more acceptable to Zola than that which called itself naturalist. Yet when Kafū presently came into his own as a power in the literary world, he was called antinaturalist — for he never admitted that flat, shapeless household reports were the ultimate in fiction’ (Seidensticker, 1965, pp. 13-14). 133 The exact content of Kafū’s classes has not been recorded; a former student remembered that Kafū would mainly bring to class French literary magazines, such as Les Nouvelles littéraires or the literary columns of Le Figaro, and discuss them with the students (Kawamori, 1992, p. 2).

75 as the future writers Satō Haruo (1892-1964), Kubota Mantarō (1889-1963), Minakami Takitarō (1887-1940), and Horiguchi Daigaku.134 Reading their memoirs, it appears clearly that their only motivation was to get close to Kafū (Hasegawa, 2009, pp. 106-107). Kafū also became the editor in chief of the new literary magazine affiliated with the university, Mita bungaku (Literature of Mita, Mita being the neighbourhood where Keiō University is located), created in opposition to Waseda bungaku. One of the magazine’s most notable achievements, for which it is remembered today, may have been to have launched Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s literary career. In November 1911, Kafū published an article that remains famous, ‘Tanizaki Jun’ichirō-shi no sakuhin’ (The Works of Mr. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō), in which he lavishes praise on the then unknown 25 years old author, claiming that ‘his writing is perfection’ (KZ, vol. 7, p. 489). 135 He adds: ‘Mr. Tanizaki’s works are the best illustration of an art of Decadence that has reached the extreme point of decomposition. They can truly be called Decadent art’ (KZ, vol. 7, p. 487).136 More than a provider of academic knowledge, Keiō University thus became a place where similarly minded, creative individuals met and developed their own aesthetic. The newly organised department enjoyed an atmosphere of freedom that the former students remembered fondly, marked with respect for the professors but little formal hierarchy. Minakami wrote that ‘at the time, the literature department at Mita was like a paradise where students were absolutely free to behave the way they wanted’ (Hasegawa, 2009, p. 108).137 Kafū would not hesitate to take his students out of the university and taught at all hours in cafés and bars (Hasegawa, 2009, p. 109). In his short story Taiken (Lassitude, May 1910), Kafū represents himself as a highly un- professional professor, adopting the paradoxically flattering persona of the perfect dilettante.

134 Some of them were enrolled in the literature department (Satō and Horiguchi), some were enrolled in other departments within Keiō (Kubota and Minakami). This group of young writers surrounding Kafū is sometimes called the ‘Mita School (Mita-ha)’ (Miyagi, 1976, pp. 224-226). However, they did not share a common aesthetic or style; as I argue below, it is more appropriate to say they were united in a certain vision of life and art. 135 「谷崎氏の作品の特徴とすべき所は、文章の完全なる事である。」 136「谷崎氏の作品をば糜爛の極致に達したデカダンスの芸術の好適例と見做すのである。已にデカダンスの芸術と云ふ。」Mita bungaku is still published today, but I only mention here what is known as the ‘first period’ of the magazine, from its creation to March 1925, when it temporarily stopped to appear (Miyagi, 1976, p. 220). 137 「その頃の三田の文学部は、自由勝手に学生にふるまわせてくれる極楽のようなところでした。」「わが半生の記」

76 The obligation to stand in a classroom and teach what is called literature had unexpectedly befallen to me. [...] I am someone who does not trust himself. I have never once in my life been impudent enough to assert or teach anything to any public. [...] If someone is willing to listen, I am very grateful, but if not, it does not sadden or anger me. [...] This is an attitude of extreme un-seriousness, which sees all things in this world lightly and entrusts in their outcome (KZ, vol. 7, pp. 299-300).138

This posture of offhanded frivolousness was clearly working. The writer Uno Kōji (1891-1961), who was not enrolled at Keiō, recalled as follows the growing reputation of the department among the young aspiring writers of his generation:

At the time, for a certain type of twenty-year old literature students, Mita bungaku and Nagai Kafū were like God [...]. Like God, but with an easy familiarity at the same time. For this reason, the students who hung out at Tsuzuki in the Shiroganechō’s neighbourhood [where some Waseda students including Uno Kōji lived] [...] were speaking about quitting Waseda and transferring to Mita. And many nearly did (Hasegawa, 2009, p. 108).139

The key to Decadence’s specificity may be found here, in the uncompromising quest for individual independence that characterises Kafū’s attitude towards any kinds of organised institutions, be they academic, social, or state-run. Having distanced himself from his family’s expectations by endorsing the persona of the eccentric, celibate intellectual, Kafū also refuses to be part of any social organisation even when he is effectively an active member of both the academia and the Japanese literary world — as the celebrated and influential editor of Mita bungaku. For the young

138 「今度は意外にも学校の教室に立って文学と云ふものを講義せねばならなくなった。[...] もともと自分は己れを信ずる事のできぬ者である。自分は今まで一度だって世間に対して厚面しく何事をも主張したり教へたりした事はない。[...] もし聞いてくれる人があったら非常に感謝する代り、聞いて呉れないからとて怒りの悲しみもせぬ。[...] 茲に世の中の凡ての事を軽く視て其の成り行きに任すと云ふ極めて不真面目な態度がある。」 139 「その頃は、或る種の二十歳の文学学生には、「三田文学」と永井荷風は、[...] 神様のやうなものであった。神様のやうなものであって、もっと親しみのあるものであった。そのために、白銀町の都築に集まった学生たちは、[...] 早稲田を止めて、三田へ転校しようか、と云った程である。さうして、殆ど転校しかかった程である。」「文学の三十年」

77 generations born after the Meiji Restoration, this aspiration for individual freedom, at once unyielding and charmingly frivolous, proved irresistibly attractive. The celebrated Kafū scholar Yoshida Seiichi explains the fundamental differences between Zola and the Japanese author quite rightly not in terms of style or school but as follows:

Between Kafū and Zola, [...] there is a big difference in nature. Zola had a strong purpose to shape through literature a republican society that he thought would guarantee an ‘ideal life’. [...] However, Kafū was devoid of passion for such a political consciousness, or for idealism in general. He was a nihilist. [...] His distaste for and revolt against plutocracy [...] did not lead to the edification of the ideal society. One could say that it went no further than negative criticism (Yoshida, 1979, pp. 311-312).140

Yoshida, writing this in the 1970s when Japanese academia was strongly influenced by Marxism, phrases Kafū’s distaste for commitment — be it institutional or ideological — in negative terms. However, one could argue that Zola’s humanism represents the exception rather than the rule within French Naturalism: Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers display the same ‘nihilism’ towards all things social. What these writers describe — as well as many of Zola’s less political novels such as La Bête humaine — are the grim consequences of the ‘negation of men’s freedom of will’, as Ueda Bin puts it in the passage quoted above. Moreover, if, as Ikuho Amano points out, Karaki Junzō (1964) has analysed this critical stance as a passive act of withdrawal accomplished over the centuries by countless ‘useless men (muyōsha)’ (Amano, 2013, pp. 2-3), diluting Kafū’s quest for total independence by identifying it with the intellectual’s lament against society’s demands does not allow, in my view, for an understanding of the deep preoccupation with freewill Naturalism and Decadence alike exhibit; I therefore do not agree with Amano who seems to include I-novelists such as Tayama Katai or Kasai Zenzō within Japanese Decadence (Amano, 2013, p. 7). The ‘nihilism’ underlined by Yoshida thus

140 「荷風とゾラとでは、[...] 資質の上で、態度の上で大きい相違があった。ゾラの場合は [...] 「理想の人生」である共和主義の社会を文学を通じて形成しようとする意図が猛烈であった。[...] しかし荷風にはそうした政治意識や、とりわけ理想主義的な情熱はなかった。彼は性格的にニヒリスチックであった。[...] 金権主義に対する増悪反撥[は][...] 理想的社会の建設と結びついていない。いわばたんなる否定的批判にとどまっていたのである。」

78 needs to be re-evaluated in order to understand what makes an author ‘Decadent’. I thus subscribe to Noda Utarō’s argument that ‘Decadent means a rebellious spirit. At the time, rebellion meant, as [Kinoshita] Mokutarō wrote, opposing freethought to structural feudalism, and, as Ueda Bin said, “re-making old grabs” by transposing the spirit of European literature [...]. It was a time when these writers were trying to open their eyes to universality’ (Noda, 1976, p. 11).141 The focus on individualism is fundamental in my view to identify the common core of Decadence, beyond genres, styles, and schools. In ‘Futsukoku ni okeru inshōha’ (Impressionism in France, 1909, re-published in Sangoshū in 1913), Kafū writes about the literature ‘born out of Zola’s Naturalism and that has taken a step further in a new direction’ (KZ, vol. 6, p. 324).142 He insists on the fact that this literature is ‘not bound by form or anything else’ and that ‘nothing can be said about a style that would apply to its entirety’ (idem.).143 The only decisive characteristic of this literature that may be called neo-Naturalist is ‘the display of individualism (kojinshugi no hakki)’ (idem.). Regenia Gagnier has shown how nineteenth-century Decadence was analysed as ‘when the individuation of parts led to the disintegration of the whole, and a Decadent style in literature as an anarchistic style in which everything was sacrificed to the development of the individual parts’ (Gagnier, 2010, p. 91). Gagnier underlines that it is especially Havelock Ellis who theorised this idea of Decadence as an aesthetic celebrating the ‘individual parts flourish[ing] at the expense of the whole’ (Gagnier, 2010, p. 4), following earlier definitions by Paul Bourget and Désiré Nisard. Ellis thus writes in 1889:

The individual is the social cell. In order that the organism should perform its functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms composing it should perform their functions with energy, but with subordinated energy [...]. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the

141 「デカダンとはいはば反逆精神である。当時にあっては、杢太郎が書いてゐるやうに、困循な封建思想に対する自由思想の反逆であり、上田敏の述べるやうに「古き表を作りなほす」ための [...] 欧羅巴文学精神の移入[...] であった。世界性に向かって眼を開かうとした当時[であった。]」 142 「ゾラあたりの自然主義より出でて更に一歩新しき方面に進んだもの」Let us point our that Arthur Symons divides Decadence between Symbolist poetry and Impressionist prose. 143 「形式その他何にも捉はれず」「全体に於ける手法の如何などといふことはとても述べれない。」

79 anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and enters into decadence as soon as the individual life becomes exaggerated beneath the influence of acquired well-being, and of heredity. A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which we call language. [...] A decadent style [...] is an anarchistic style in which everything is sacrificed to the development of the individual parts (Gagnier, 2010, p. 2).144

In a typical paradox, Decadence both accepts this view of the necessary interdependence of the parts for a harmonious whole and embraces the individuation of the parts that causes decadence. Within this worldview, Naturalism in particular focuses on describing the social and organic mechanisms that create human interdependence; Decadence begins when the focus is put on the individuals who manage (or try) to escape these mechanisms. As a result, the Decadent maintains a highly paradoxical relationship to individualism: it is held responsible for decadence but makes it the main motto of his life. Kafū ends the short story Taiken with an uncompromising description of the superiority of the Decadent for refusing to take part in the social game of power struggle in establishing hierarchical relations between the individuals.

For those who are well read, who are rich in knowledge, who have sophisticated taste, who enjoy politeness, who have a deep experience of life, who have tasted all the emotions that are to be tasted; for them the courage to face any kind of struggle naturally becomes feeble. It is not that they are afraid of struggle, but rather that they can tell how excruciatingly boring the result of the struggle will be. Even when they try not to guess the outcome, their abundant and acute experience will make them see through it. [...] Today, any transit train station —Sudachō, Oharichō, or Kayabachō, it does not matter which — teaches us more than

144 Even though Ellis was not translated in Japan until the 1990s, his books in English seem to have been relatively easily available in Japan despite the censorship they faced in Europe; Miyazawa Kenji, for instance, managed to buy a couple of volumes of Studies in the Psychology of Sex in the remote province of Iwate in the 1920s (Nobutoki, 2002, pp. 23-25). Ellis must also have been known as the

80 a hundred books. It explains the secret method to succeed in life. Trying to always be ahead of the others is truly violent. It needs energy. It does not allow any awareness of the surroundings that may lead to embarrassment. It consists in simply pushing compulsively everything and everyone. There lies the beginning of success. There one can find victory (KZ, vol. 7, pp. 302-303).145

In this cynical portrait of the ‘successful’ modern man, Kafū leaves little place for ambiguity: he is one of the refined, sophisticated, experienced, polished — in a word, superior — individuals with which the quote opens, and he has nothing but contempt for the mass the gregariousness of which consists of each part trying to get ahead of the other. Kafū, declaring that he has no fighting spirit, needs not be understood as an admission of defeat. The Decadent’s individualistic stance is indeed a way of bypassing the social game by automatically considering anyone who participates in it mundane or vulgar. This is the Decadent’s way of being out of the world. We shall see below how the Decadent relies on elitism, Aestheticism, and dandyism for asserting his uniqueness.

2. Worshipping Pan: Aestheticism as a Lifestyle

Advocating individualism is by no means a prerogative of Decadence within Japanese literature; as Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit analyses, the movement to reevaluate fiction that arose with the Meiji Restoration was strongly connected to the introduction of liberal thought to Japan, especially through the 1870s writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi, the founder of Keiō University, who ‘regarded the paternalistic, hierarchical attitudes of the past as a threat to the autonomy of the Japanese state and emphasized the importance of individual self-respect, as well as a sense of national independence and freedom’ (Hijiya-Kirschnereit, 1996, p. 16). Consequently, translator of Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, and Mori Ōgai used Ellis’ translation to translate the latter (Pitarch Fernandez, 2015, p. 28). 145 「学才に富み、知識豊かに、趣味高く、礼儀を喜び、人生の経験深く、喜怒哀楽の夢のかぎりを味ひ尽くしたものは、自然と何事に対しても争闘する勇気が乏しくなる。争闘を恐れると云ふよりは寧ろ、争闘の結果の甚だつまらない事を予測するからである。予測しまいと思っても豊富緻密なる経験から自然と先きが見え透いて仕舞ふからである。[...] 須田町でも尾張町でも茅場町でも何処でもよい、電車の乗換場の混雑は吾々に向かって日々百巻の書物よりも猶有益な教訓を与へてゐる。[...] 処世の方法を説明してゐる。人より先ぜんと欲するものは実に乱暴である。勢いがよい。気まりがわるい抔と四辺を顧る余裕を許さぬ。何でも無理押して行く。此処に始めて成功があった。勝利があった。」

81 Tsubouchi Shōyō’s advocacy in favour of realism in literary fiction was rooted within a firm belief in the individual’s capacity for self-governance, reason, and progress (Kamei Hideo, 1999, p. 36). The Decadent’s take on individualism adds to the list of the enemies of freedom according to liberalism — feudalism, religious superstition, social determinism — liberalism itself, as any ideology that thinks the individual as part of a whole is seen as restricting. This entails Decadence’s logical incompatibility with social movements and a somewhat ambiguous if not hypocritical position towards the bourgeois society that holds liberalism as its dominant ideology. As David Weir argues, the Decadent typically has

aristocratic pretensions (or, as Roger Shattuck says, [...] the squandering of ‘the last vestiges of aristocracy’). Sometimes the decadent may pursue a bohemian life-style, but he always imagines himself a cultural aristocrat, while being, at base, thoroughly bourgeois. Here again Baudelaire appears as the archetypal decadent figure, not to mention such bourgeois bourgeoisiephobes as Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers (Weir, 1995, p. xv).

The Decadent wants to see in the bourgeois his antithesis because the bourgeois is thoroughly involved in the world, as he derives his status from the amount of actual material presence he manages to builds around himself. On the contrary, the aristocrat, as the word’s etymology expresses, does not need to do anything to be the best. Weir is thus right in his use of the term ‘cultural aristocrat’. The Decadent revolts at once against feudal cast/class systems that narrow down individual freedom and negate personal talent, and against the liberal idea that all men are created equal, specifically for the same reasons: it does not allow for the exceptional to flourish in detriment of the whole. The Decadent’s individualism is thus inseparable from elitism.

82 Ueda Bin uses a similar vocabulary in his essay attacking liberalism, ‘Kizokushugi to heiminshugi’ (Aristocratism and Commoner-ism, 1911).146 In this advocacy in favour of ‘aristocratism’, Bin does not in any way preach a return to the feudal caste system but argues that ‘in reality, men are not equal’ (UBZ, vol. 5, p. 59) 147 ; the ‘aristocrat’ is therefore the individual superior by his intellectual excellence (yūtōsha), while the ‘commoner’ is ‘the ordinary man’. He argues that because of this innate difference in individual talent, the value of art cannot and should not be decided by ‘referendum’ (UBZ, vol. 5, p. 61) and that ‘the blind movement of the masses devoid of the leadership of a genius is indeed dangerous’ (UBZ, vol. 5, p. 68).148 These words echo closely Bourget’s Decadent manifesto:

Fifty years from now the style of the Goncourt brothers — I name men who have deliberately chosen the path of decadence — will be understood only by specialists. The theoreticians of decadence would retort: what does it matter? Is the writer’s purpose to set himself up as a perpetual candidate before the universal suffrage of centuries to come? We delight in our so-called corruptions of style as well as in the refined beings of our race and our time. It remains to determine whether the exceptional group we constitute is not, in fact, an aristocracy and whether in the realm of aesthetics the plurality of votes does not, in fact, add up to a plurality of dunces (Bourget, 1885, pp. 28-29).149

146 Ikuho Amano quickly presents Bin’s essay in English (Amano, 2013, pp. 80-81). The term heiminshugi does not have a proper equivalent in English, and ‘populism’ as suggested by Amano (Amano, 2013, p. 80) is not in my view correct. The term was coined by Tokutomi Sohō in the mid- 1880s; its meaning is close to ‘liberalism’, ‘the specific nuance that it presents within the context of the early Meiji period is an affirmation of a casteless society [...]. Tokutomi championed full and open participation of all Japanese citizens in all areas of social life, including bureaucracy and government, with a concomitant emphasis on releasing the economic energies of Japan’s budding bourgeois class’ (Swale, 2005, p. 86). I thus follow Alistair Swale and translate it literally. See also John D. Pierson (Pierson, 2014, pp. 177-180). 147「実際に於いて人間は平等で無い。」 148 「天才の指導なき群衆の盲動は実に危険なものである。」

83 Decadent individualism thus establishes itself as a rebellion against the imposed hierarchy established by feudalism as well as liberalism’s egalitarianism; this double rebellion illustrates what Antoine Compagnon calls the ‘demand for freedom (l’exigence de liberté)’ of the anti-moderns (Compagnon, 2005, p. 14). Kafū displays the same hatred of group movements, be they social, ideological, political, or even literary. Indeed, in the short text announcing the creation of Mita bungaku for instance, titled ‘Mita bungaku no hakkan’ (The creation of Mita bungaku, April 1910), Kafū manages the tour de force of simultaneously creating a magazine while refusing to commit to its creation, both belonging and not belonging to the literary milieu that makes his identity as a writer possible, performing what Dominique Maingueneau calls ‘a paratopia of identity’ (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 86). Far from being an organised and hierarchized artistic manifesto, like the one we have seen in Myōjō, the text presents itself as a musing around the charms of meeting friends (one of them, alluded to, is Ueda Bin), taking the train, and contemplating the different landscapes of Tokyo. Only indirectly can the reader understand that the author is performing these activities in order to create a new literary magazine. The outcome — the creation of a magazine — is thus presented as a kind of unexpected by-product of Kafū’s strolls with his friends.

Anyhow, as time was passing in such a way, the magazine Mita bungaku came into existence. I am in no position to know the motivation, the necessity, or the purpose for creating such a magazine. I was only made aware, by various circumstances and requirements I was put under, that I find myself in a position where, as the editor of the magazine, I need to worry whether it is going to sell or not. ‘Is it going to sell? Is it going to sell?’ This is the fundamental force that drives the hungry wolf at night. In order to sell, you must first make your own promotion to a shameless extent. One

149 ‘Dans cinquante ans, le style des frères Goncourt, — je choisis des décadents de parti pris, — ne sera compris que des spécialistes. Qu’importe ? pourraient répondre les théoriciens de la décadence. Le but de l’écrivain est-il de se poser en perpétuel candidat devant le suffrage universel des siècles ? Nous nous délectons de ce que vous appelez nos corruptions de style, et nous délectons avec nous les raffinés de notre race et de notre heure. Il reste à savoir si notre exception n’est pas une aristocratie, et si, dans l’ordre de l’esthétique, la pluralité des suffrages représente autre chose que la pluralité des ignorances’. To quote the Goncourt brothers themselves: ‘Democracy equals mediocrity and means barbarism; science deflects us from a true perception of reality; reality is boredom, as only the superior writers know; and the superior being is the decadent’ (quoted and translated by David Weir, 1995, p. 49).

84 technique that was born out of this necessity is called ‘advertising’. ‘Advertising’ means selfishly asserting the absolute value of the thing you sell without taking any responsibility, based on no proof or demonstration. [...] There is nothing sadder than to feel the spirit of the time we live in. You cannot be beautiful if you do not use the face-cleansing powder Misono. In the same way, you cannot know literature if you do not read Mita bungaku (KZ, vol. 7, p. 287).150

After denouncing the commercialism of the modern world, Kafū mockingly echoes the advertising of a popular cosmetic product in order to promote the magazine, demonstrating the absurdity and narrow-mindedness of the one-size-fits-all mentality; just like advertisements are selling void, the individualism preached by masse consumerism is illusory. Kafū’s individualism is thus both enhanced and mitigated by his refusal to participate in the self-promotion that the commercial lifestyle of the bourgeoisie is based on. As David Weir observes in the quote above, most Decadent writers, if not all, belonged sociologically to the bourgeoisie, and this applies to the Japanese context; the way they chose to escape their class is through a delicate balance of enjoying the bourgeois lifestyle while refusing to engage in its ideology of materialism, respectability, and efficiency, literally creating for themselves a ‘parasitic location’ where, Dominique Maingueneau argues, the paratopic writer dwells (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 53). The poet and playwright Nagata Mikihiko (1887- 1964), contributor to Myōjō and Subaru, recalled the period’s spirit as follows: ‘It was a time when young artists did not see anything but art. We were drunk on real nostalgia, on reverie and poetry [...]. The label “commerce” was not yet hung on the

150 「文芸雑誌「三田文学」は斯う云ふ時間の進行の間に兎に角世に出る事になったのである。/ 如何なる動機、如何なる必要、如何なる目的から「三田文学」が発行さるるに至ったかは自分の知る処ではない。自分は唯雑誌編輯人として雑誌がうまく売れるものか否かを心配せねばならぬ地位に立ってゐる事を種々なる事情と条件の下に自覚すべく迫まられてゐるのに心付くばかりである。売らん哉、売らん哉、これが飢た狼を闇夜に活動させる根本の力である。売らんが爲には先づ自己を臆面なく極点まで推讃する必要が生ずる。この必要の下に生じた一種の技術が乃ち「広告」と称するものだ。「広告」は何等の論拠も実證もなくして無責任に自分勝手に広告せんとする其ものの価値の絶対無限を説く事である。 [...] 人は其の生きつつある時代を感ずる程悲しい事はない。/ クラブ洗粉御園白粉を使はなければ美人になれない。この意味に於いて「三田文学」を読まないものは文学を知らないものである。」

85 threshold of the artist’s heart’ (Noda, 1976, p. 20)151, or, rather, the artist pretended to escape bourgeois material concerns. The keystone which supports this symbolic escape is Aestheticism. Retrospectively reflecting on his ideological influences, Kafū writes in the essay ‘Suika’ (Watermelon, 1937) that ‘for the last sixty years, what has guided my thought and conduct are the ideas of Chinese men and Westerners. [...] By Western thought, I mean nineteenth-century romanticism and the individualistic art for art’s sake ideology that followed’ (Miyagi, 1976, p. 88).152 Art for art’s sake can be considered as the view of art that Aestheticism promotes; Robert Johnson argues that Aestheticism can further be seen as a view of life and as a ‘practical tendency in literature and the arts (and in literary and art criticism)’ (Johnson, 1969, p. 12). Aestheticism, defined loosely as the cult of beauty above anything else, concerns a large variety of authors with very different understandings of the place of art with regard to social norms and moral values in Europe as well as Japan, and ‘the concept of Aestheticism that included both Ruskin and Wilde [...] would be broad to the point of nebulousness’ (Johnson, 1969, p. 11). What needs to be underlined in order to understand the place and function of Aestheticism within Decadence is that the concept exists in a state of tension regarding the hedonistic and/or amoral lifestyle advocated by the Decadent. European Aestheticism was introduced in the early twentieth-century to Japan mainly through Walter Pater. Ueda Bin is again to be credited for being the first Japanese to mention Pater in a series of articles published in the first, third, and fifth issue of Teikoku bungaku in 1894 (Itō Isao, 2017, p. 315). In May of the following year, Bin published ‘Bijutsu no kanshō’ (The Appreciation of Art) in Bungakukai, where he built on Pater’s Aestheticism and adapts it to the Japanese context (Sasabuchi, 1980, p. 2). It is through this article that the young Hirata Tokuboku (1873-1943), future scholar of English literature and collaborator with Ernest Fenollosa, discovered Pater and made it his life mission to translate and introduce British Aestheticism in Japan (Sasabuchi, 1980, p. 2).

151 「若い芸術家が芸術より他に何ものをも見なかった時代だ。真のノスタルジアと、空想と詩とに陶酔 [...] した時代だ。芸術家の心の扉に、まだ「商買」の札が張られなかった時代だ。」 152 「この六十年の間、わたくしの思想と生活との方向を指導して来たものは、支那人と西洋人との思想であった。[...] 西洋の思想は十九世紀のロマンチズムと其以後の個人主義的芸術至上主義とである。」

86 Koenraad Swart identifies the combination of individualism and Aestheticism as ‘the most important legacy of French Romanticism to the so-called Decadent movement in literature at the end of the nineteenth century’ (Swart, 1964, p. 77). However, the two elements exist in a constant tension within Decadence. Indeed, if we have identified Decadent individualism as a way to be out of the world, Aestheticism, especially as it is articulated by Pater, conceives the appreciation of beauty as fundamentally rooted within the real. Pater thus claims that beauty is to be found within daily human experience, as

the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics (The Renaissance; Pater, 1974, p. 17).

Pater conceives of the experience of beauty as sensual, as it is based on sense perception. Thus, as Harold Bloom writes, ‘Pater meant us always to remember what mostly we have forgotten: that “aesthete” is from the Greek aisthetes, “one who perceives”’ (Bloom, 1974, p. 164). As Leon Chai puts it, ‘the history of Aestheticism [...] is in effect the history of a quest for specific impressions or experiences that are felt to possess an intrinsic significance — above all, the experience of beauty and the experience of form’ (Chai, 1990, p. xi). However, the art of ‘observation’ advocated by Pater ‘depends heavily on a discriminating and disciplined taste, on temperance and control’ (Weir, 1995, p. 67); the privileged lifestyle of the aesthete, according to Pater, is closer to one of monkish asceticism than of unbridled bacchanalia. Pater’s aesthetic ideal combines ‘comely decadence’ with the ‘charm of ascesis’ (Pater, 1974, p. 20), such that ‘a balance of strength and sweetness, of strangeness and beauty, is a large part of the aesthetic program that Pater imagined’ (Weir, 1995, p. 64). From Pater’s claim of relative (as opposed to absolute) beauty to the Decadent disdain for the real, Aestheticism needs to be taken one step further. ‘Because [...] Pater had recommended art for art’s sake and the experience for experience’s sake, [...] his programme for individual aesthetic discrimination could modulate into a programme for decadence: experience for its

87 own sake could very easily become (as in the case of Dorian Gray and his creator) illicit experience for its own sake’ (Small, 1979, p. xvii).153 Wilde and Baudelaire may represent extreme points in their fascination with perversion and disregard for morality, but Decadents have in common a desire for freedom from moral values that is expressed in Aestheticism understood as the world view that places aesthetics above anything else, applied to art but also to the Decadent lifestyle. Indeed, creating a place out of the world does not mean eschewing the mundane but rather bringing art into daily life. If the cloistered Des Esseintes can be seen as the archetypical Decadent hero, so can the dandy, whose ‘taste for finery corresponds to a reaction against a hostile environment, adopts frivolity and the art of living [art de vivre] as a protest against utilitarianism, the revolt of imagination against physical ugliness and narrow-minded morals (Le goût de la parure, chez le dandy, correspond à une réaction contre un milieu hostile, élève la protestation de la frivolité et de l’art de vivre contre l’utilitarisme, la révolte de l’imagination contre la laideur physique et la morale étriquée)’ (Carrassus, 1966, p. 115). The French expression art de vivre really does capture the Decadent revolt against the modern world: living must be turned into art. For the Decadent, ‘art does more than reproduce life — indeed, it enhances, purifies, transforms it. At the same time, without life, art alone is meaningless — a suave, polished performance, nothing more’ (Chai, 1990, p. 23). From this philosophy come the simplifications that equal Decadence to a self-indulgent lifestyle made of luxuries and pleasures, for which the Decadents were attacked by the likes of Max Nordau in Europe and Akagi Kōhei in Japan.154 There is indeed a fine line between dedicating one’s life to the exploration of the senses and losing oneself in a repetitive chaos of meaningless pleasures — as Dorian Gray experiences. The Japanese Decadents seemed to have walked along that line exceptionally well; maybe due to

153 See also Leon Chai: ‘This insight into life’s formal possibilities ultimately leads Wilde to differ from Pater. “In Marius the Epicurean,” Wilde observes, “Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion in the deep, sweet, austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator indeed, and one to whom it is given ‘to contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions,’ which Wordsworth defines as the poet’s true aim: yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the vessels of the Sanctuary to notice that it is the Sanctuary of Sorrow that he is gazing at” (Letters, p. 476). For Wilde, life implies more than aesthetic impressions’ (Chai, 1990, p. 103). 154 See the Introduction.

88 the absence of a Judeo-Christian fear of sin, they managed to develop a somewhat freer and less pessimistic Decadent art de vivre and built their aesthetic around it.155 The Circle of Pan illustrates this point perfectly. A gathering of similar- minded writers and artists launched by the poets behind Subaru — the Circle’s first meeting was announced in the magazine in December 1908 — it was nevertheless not linked to a specific magazine, a specific genre or even medium — poets, novelists, painters... were all welcome — nor was its membership exclusive or strictly regimented. People from Subaru, Mita bungaku, Shirakaba, and Okujō teien (Roof Garden)156 would meet, drink, and eat together twice a month. The restaurants where the meetings would be held seemed to have been especially carefully chosen; so as to emulate Parisian café culture, it had to serve Western-style cuisine and had to have a view on the Sumida river, which would stand in for the Seine (Noda, 1976, pp. 105- 106). Mori Ōgai and Ueda Bin were often guests of honour — the latter would occasionally delight the gathering with popular French songs (Noda, 1976, pp. 124- 125). The Circle of Pan’s purpose was more than anything to open a space within society where a shared experience of artistic freedom and an indulgent lifestyle would provide an escape from rigid social norms and the utilitarianism of Meiji. Choosing the chaotic figure of the goat god Pan, symbol of unbridled sensual energy and creative imagination, as the namesake of the Circle was no coincidence; Pan is said to be from Arcadia, the utopian paradise untouched by the evils of civilisation according to European Renaissance. As Noda Utarō writes:

This movement that was born with the Circle of Pan had a Decadent appearance. It was decadent and dissolute, and also utopian; what lay at

155 About the Japanese take on the French Decadence’s treatment of Christianity, see the following Chapter. 156 Okujō teien was a short-lived magazine dedicated to poetry and visual arts created by Kitahara Hakushū, Nagata Hideo (1885-1949), and Kinoshita Mokutarō, who, besides being a poet, was also a gifted painter. The magazine was banned by the authorities after its second issue, accused of ‘obscenity’. Uniting literature and visual art was an important part of the project of the Circle of Pan, as Noda Utarō writes: ‘Around the end of 1908 [...], Western-style salons were happening everywhere. [...] The character of the Circle of Pan was completely different. First, most of its members were unknown youths who, conscious of the history of the artistic and literary movements of the fin de siècle French cafés, were animated by the energy to create something new by making poets (literature) and painters (art) mingle’ (Noda, 1976, p. 107).「明治四十一年の終り頃には、[...] 西洋のサロンのやうな会合はあちらこちらで催されてゐた。[...] パンの会の性格は全く違ってゐた。先づ皆が無名の若者達で、世紀末フランスのカフェ文芸運動の歴史などを意識して、詩人（文学）と画家（美術）の混合から新らしいものを生み出さうとする情熱が根底を成してゐたことである。」

89 the heart of it was the energy of youth. This energy was clearly the sign of a rebellious spirit, standing against Japanese society and politics as they were at the time (Noda, 1976, p. 179).157

The poetry that came out of the Circle of Pan celebrates life’s pleasures in a chiselled and sometimes archaic style. Kitahara Hakushū’s maiden volume of poetry Jashūmon (The Heretics, 1909) and Kinoshita Mokutarō’s poems published later in the volume Shokugo no uta (Songs for after a meal, 1917) are emblematic.158 So is Yoshii Isamu’s maiden volume Sake hogai (Revelry, 1910). Yoshii Isamu (1886- 1960), albeit relatively forgotten today, deserves attention if only for the way his life story makes him the perfect embodiment of the Decadent poet. If, as we have seen, all Decadents fancy themselves an aristocrat, Yoshii was one of the rare ones to be actually born in a noble family. His grandfather Yoshii Tomozane (1828-1891) was one of the young samurai from Satsuma who rebelled against the Bakufu and thus received the title of Count under the new regime.159 Isamu, though born in luxury and nobility, was of poor health. He suffered from an early age from tuberculosis — the romantic illness par excellence —, dropped out of Waseda University, and lived an ultimately long life of leisure. His love life was marked in the 1930s by the much publicised adulterous affairs of his equally aristocratic wife Tokuko.160 After the war, he moved to Kyoto where he carried on a friendship with Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Sake hogai was a volume of poetry that suited this living embodiment of the most clichéd Decadent fantasies. It was published in a luxurious white binding with a

157「パンの大会に現れたこの運動の姿は、デカダンにもみえた。デカダンにみえて放逸でもあり、空想的でもあったが、その底にたぎりつづけるものは青春というエネルギーであった。そのエネルギーは当時の日本の社会や政治に対しての批判ともなって明らかに反逆精神を示した。」The ‘energy of youth’ being at the core of Decadence, an aesthetic that embraces the tiredness of exhausted civilisations, is less contradictory than it may appear. Noël Richard, analysing Anatole Baju’s idea of décadisme as a ‘youth elixir’, concludes that ‘aesthetic decadence must be understood by antiphrase: it is the synonym of lively youthfulness and renewal (la décadence esthétique, elle, doit s’entendre par antiphrase ; elle est synonyme de jeunesse fringante et de renouvellement’ (Richard, 1968, p. 259). 158 See the following Chapter. 159 The aristocracy had been re-organised by the Meiji regime. The old court aristocracy (kuge) was fused with high-ranking samurai (bushi), and low-ranked samurai who supported the Meiji Restoration, into a new category called kazoku. Only members of the kazoku were given ranks, such as count (hakushaku) or duke (kōshaku) inspired by European aristocracies. 160 Yoshii Tokuko was at the heart of the ‘the lecherous aristocrats affair (furyō kazoku jiken)’ where multiple aristocratic ladies were accused in the newspapers of having affairs with a dance teacher in 1933 (see Senda Minoru, 2002). Moreover, Tokuko was the niece of Yanagiwara Byakuren (1885- 1967), who was herself the niece of the Emperor Taishō’s mother. Yanagiwara, who was also a poet, became famous in 1921 for leaving her rich industrialist husband for a young socialist lawyer and political activist, Miyazaki Ryūsuke (1892-1971).

90 design by Takamura Kōtaro on the cover, next to a sentence in Sanskrit written in gold letters that was only there out of elitism and/or for visual effect, as Yoshii himself, displaying a typical disdain for serious erudition, claimed not to know what it meant (Noda, 1976, p. 232). On the first page was a little drawing from Kinoshita Mokutarō which represented a ship approaching a shore where characters dressed in kimono were dancing; on the ship’s sail was written in alphabet: ‘BACCHUS ET VENUS’. The main theme of the volume was thus clearly announced: it was meant to celebrate love and wine — the joys of physical and aesthetic pleasures alike. Yoshii Isamu, Takamura Kōtaro, and Kinoshita Mokutarō were all members of the Circle of Pan. The gathering gained its legitimacy and its place within Japanese literary history for what it was more than what it did: it existed as a paratopic space where artists could freely mingle and connect. It is thus during a meeting of the Circle of Pan, on April 10, 1909, that the young Tanizaki Jun’ichirō met his idol Nagai Kafū for the first time. That evening, Ueda Bin and Yosano Tekkan were also present. Tanizaki recalls the encounter as follows.

An elegant gentleman of 29, tall and thin, wearing a dark suit, his long hair neatly combed back with oil, appeared at the door. His face was long as a cutting board and the bone of his jaw prominent, his colouring somewhat sickly bluish [...]; even though his tall appearance and his black clothes seemed very proper, he was not devoid of an air akin to Mephistopheles. ‘It’s Mr. Nagai’, someone said in my ear. I had guessed at first glance. And, for an instant, I thought I had lost my breath. [...] Towards the end [of the evening], I gathered my courage and went to see Professor Kafū: ‘Professor! I do really admire you! I worship you! I have read everything you have ever written!’ I said, and bowed stiffly. Kafū, who never drank, did not stand up and said, as if to shush away a nuisance: ‘Thank you, thank you.’ (Noda, 1976, pp. 166-168)161

161 「痩躰長身に黒っぽい背広を着、長い頭髪を後ろの方へ油で綺麗に撫でつけた、二十九歳の瀟洒たる紳士が会場の戸口に這入って来た。彼はその顔の輪郭が俎板の如く長方形で顎の骨が張り、やや病的な青く浅黒い血色をし、[...] 黒い服とひよろ高い身の丈とが、すっきりしてゐる反面に、何処がメフィストフェレスのやうな感じがしないでもなかった。「永井さんだ」と、誰かが私の耳の端で云った。私も一眼で直ぐさう悟った。そして一瞬間、息の詰るやうな気がした。[...] 最後に私は思ひ切って荷風先生の前へ行き、「先生！僕は実に先生が好きなんです！僕は先生を崇拝してをります！先生のお書きになったものはみな読んでをります！」と云ひながら、ピョコンと一つお辞儀をした。先生は酒を飲

91 Tanizaki’s amused portrait of his own naïve enthusiasm is touching; his portrait of Kafū recreates the way he (and no doubt a lot of other admiring young writers) saw the fascinating returnee: shrouded in an aura of dangerous and exotic mystery. As we have seen, Kafū would be one of the first to praise Tanizaki’s writings and the two were to become the cornerstone of Japanese Decadent literature.

3. The Past Revisited. Edo/Tokyo as the Capital of Decadence

In his famous essay on Tanizaki mentioned above, Kafū praises the young Tanizaki on three points. The first focuses specifically on Tanizaki’s Decadent qualities, which make him, as Kafū writes, an heir of Poe and Baudelaire: ‘the profound and subtle mysticism born out of the fear felt in the flesh’ (KZ, vol. 7, p. 487).162 Kafū is referring to Tanizaki’s novella Shisei (The Tattooer, 1910), where Aestheticism’s idea of a sensory beauty — a beauty felt and seen through the senses — is brought to the extreme through the central image of a work of art (the tattoo) being carved on the living canvas that is the skin of a beautiful woman. By mingling beauty, sex, and pain in their idiosyncratic sadomasochism, Tanizaki’s writings indeed illustrate the ‘Satanic (akumashugi)’ trend to which Decadence is so often reduced, and which may be otherwise relatively under-represented within Japanese Decadence.163 The third point for which Kafū distinguishes Tanizaki among his peers is, as already mentioned above, the beauty of his writing style, which, considering Aestheticism’s focus on the form, is self-explanatory. The second point, however, may come as more of a surprise. Kafū writes that he appreciates Tanizaki’s writings because they are ‘totally urban (mattaku tokai-teki)’ (KZ, vol. 7, p. 488). He then proceeds to quote a passage from Ueda Bin’s novel Uzumaki (The Vortex, 1910) where it is claimed that the most gifted writers are the ones who manage to ‘observe and love’ the city, for it is the place where changes affecting civilisation are the most acutely felt. This shared fascination for the city inscribes these three writers within the

まれないので、端然と椅子にかけたまま、「有難うございます、有難うございます」と、うるささうに云はれた。」Seishun monogatari (Stories of youth). 162 「肉体的恐怖から生ずる神秘幽玄」

92 core of what Antoine Compagnon calls the modernity of the anti-modern: since Baudelaire, the city stands as the natural habitat of the artistic mind, the place where an art form that directly confronts and embraces the challenges of modernity can be created. It is in this non-apologetic urbanity that leaves no place for any nostalgia towards the traditional countryside that the Decadents break in the most obvious way with the Romantics. The poets of the Circle of Pan thus combine their Aestheticism with their love of an urban lifestyle, taking the city of Tokyo as a main topic for their poetry about dilettantism and artistic camaraderie. Kitahara Hakushū’s volume of poetry entitled Tokyo keibutsushi oyobi sono ta (Scenes of Tokyo and other poems, 1913) is emblematic of this trend. The volume is divided into six chapters, each with evocative titles, such as ‘Tokyo yakyoku’ (Tokyo nocturne) or ‘Ginza no ame’ (The rain on Ginza). The choice of Ginza is telling: the recently re-organised neighbourhood, with its large boulevards lined with new-style cafes, restaurants, and department stores, catered for a new kind of consumerism attracting new types of clientele; it came to represent the modernisation of Tokyo according to Western standards. However, Tokyo keibutsushi oyobi sono ta is by no means an ode to the new and shiny modern Tokyo. As Donald Keene writes,

Fascination with the West and an exoticism directed toward the vestiges of Edo culture (the twin tastes of the Devotees of Pan) are prominent [in the volume]. Many poems describe Tokyo during the rainy season, when everything seems to rot. The tone is one of world-weariness as the poet describes his mixed attraction and loathing for the city’ (Keene, 1984, p. 247).

One poem is representative of what may be called the superimposition of the ghost of Edo behind the picture of Tokyo. Entitled ‘Kin to ao to no’ (Of gold and blue), it was first published in 1910 and can be found in the chapter ‘Yuki to hanabi’ (Snow and fireworks).

163 According to Koenraad Swart, ‘it was [the] consciously adopted ideology of Satanism, individualism, and estheticism that formed the most important legacy of French Romanticism to the so- called Decadent movement in literature at the end of the nineteenth century’ (Swart, 1964, p. 77).

93 A nocturne in gold and blue, A duet of spring and summer, In young Tokyo the songs of Edo, Shadows and light in my heart (Noda, 1976, p. 225).164

The words ‘nocturne’ and ‘duet’ are loanwords from the West, but the reader discovers at the third line that they qualify traditional Japanese songs; thus the mingling of ‘shadows and light’ in the poet’s heart, which belongs as much to the ‘young Tokyo’ as to the nostalgic Edo. As Noda Utarō notices, the first line of the poem is inspired by the title of a painting by Whistler, ‘Nocturne in Blue and Gold’ (Noda, 1976, p. 226); Whistler, himself inspired by Baudelaire’s admonition to capture modernity through art (Anderson and Koval, 1994, p. 48), is often quoted by the Japanese of this generation, including Kafū. The Decadents’ city is multi-layered and ever evolving, and it is specifically within this non-static state that the passage of time can be felt and reflected upon. According to Stephen Snyder,

Nagai Kafū was a flâneur, that urban “prowler” immortalized by the “first modernist” [Marshall Berman], Baudelaire, in Le Spleen de Paris. Kafū’s perambulations in the modern(izing) metropolis that Tokyo had become by the beginning of the twentieth century, as he turns the “mobilized gaze of the flâneur” [Anne Friedberg] on the spectacle of contemporary life. [...] The city in Kafū’s fiction, in particular, becomes a stage for the presentation of a developing aesthetic vision, a vision that serves as a barometer in reverse of Japan’s cultural climate during the first half of the twentieth century (Snyder, 2000, p. 1).

Kafū and Tanizaki, but also the poets of the Circle of Pan to a lesser degree, use the city of Tokyo as a roadmap to what Dominique Maingueneau calls ‘temporal paratopia’ (Maingueneau, 2004, p. 86): a locus outside of the present, where the artist can escape the numbing conformativity of dailyness. In his own interrogation of

ノクチュルヌドウエツトかげ 164 「金と青との愁夜曲、/ 春と夏との二聲楽、/ わかい東京に江戸の唄、/ 陰影と光のわがこころ」 Translated by Donald Keene (Keene, 1984, p. 241).

94 modernity, Walter Benjamin, revisiting Baudelaire, would argue that ‘the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place’ (Benjamin, 1968, p. 172). As Kirsten Seale puts it, ‘the flâneur’s movement creates anachrony: he travels urban space, the space of modernity, but is forever looking to the past’ (Seale, 2005, p. 28). Tokyo, this new city carrying centuries of history in its wake, was the perfect embodiment of the multi-layered modern city: its vibrancy was feeding on the decay of Edo, and the more it tried to be reborn the more its past lingered like a constant shadow. Tokyo was re-enacting, in a much more radical way, the thorough transformations that Paris underwent under Baron Haussmann’s renovations in the 1850s-1870s, which the French Decadent writers of the time hailed as a sign of progress and thus, according to their paradoxical logic, of decadence. For Kafū, it seems clear that despite his self-professed love for Edo culture, its continuing disappearance augments its attraction: Edo is all the more desirable that it is a thing of the past. In the 1909 short story Fukagawa no uta (The Song of Fukagawa),165 Kafū praises the beauty born out of the sadness of an endangered city stubbornly surviving despite its exhausted shabbiness.

Until a couple of years ago, until I left Japan, Fukagawa was for a long time the place that fulfilled my fantasies, that provided me with excitements of rapture, sadness, and delight. Even though at the time the train had not yet been constructed, the beauty of the city of Tokyo was already being thoroughly destroyed; only this area situated on the outskirts across the river would let me taste, amidst the landscape of its sad and lonely backstreets, the beauty of a pure harmony that could not be reduced to its worn-out ruins (KZ, vol. 6, p. 113).166

The ‘pure’ and ‘harmonious’ beauty of the untouched old neighbourhood is thus enhanced by its general state of decay and by the contrast with the new shiny city thriving just across the river. As Edward Seidensticker puts it, ‘Edo pulls in various

165 Fukagawa is an old neighbourhood on the West side of Tokyo. 166「数年前まで、自分が日本を去るまで、水の深川は久しい間、あらゆる自分の趣味、恍惚、悲しみ、悦びの感激を満足させてくれた処であった。電車はまだ布設されてゐなかったが既に其の頃から、東京市街の美観は散々に破壊されてゐた中で、河を越した彼の場末の一画ばかりがわづかに淋しく悲しい裏町の眺望の中に、衰残と零落との云尽し得ぬ純粋一致調和の美を味はして呉れたのである。」

95 ways, through music, dance, women, and neglected buildings; and almost always it is found under heavy shadows, and smelling of mold and decay’ (Seidensticker, 1965, p. 38). However, Edo’s power of attraction does not only come from the fact that it is in the process of being replaced by Tokyo. Its remoteness in time means that Edo can be the ideal receptacle of the writer’s projections; under Kafū’s pen, Edo as a real historical city is consciously turned into a fantasyland that caters to all the needs and desires of the artist. Thus, Kafū elaborates on the culture of the pleasure quarter that the city was famous for in order to turn Edo into a capital of pleasure, where sensual encounters can be enjoyed freely. In the short story Dentsūin (The Dentsū Temple, 1911), already mentioned in the Introduction to this dissertation, Kafū writes about a bathhouse from the Edo period in which he used to spend some time as a young man.

As a remnant of the Edo period, the bathhouse had kept a second floor, where it was said that made-up women used to lure the bathing men in and play with them. When imagining the colours of the bewitching time of my declining Edo period [Edo suibō-ki], there is no cause to be envious even of the pleasures promised by these groups of beautiful women frolicking in their bath that we so often see in Western painting (KZ, vol. 7, p. 211).167

The ‘bewitching time’ that was the late Edo period exists mainly in the imagination of the narrator and in the hearsays of lustful gossipers; the delightful Edo bathhouse is thus as real as the nude paintings of Western art. The meaning of the possessive ‘my Edo period’ seems somewhat unclear, but it may hint at the sentimental commitment Kafū feels towards this particular time in history; the term suibō-ki, that may be translated as ‘period of decline’ or ‘fall’, shows that Kafū claims to have special affinities to the late Edo period. He deems it the perfect moment where the excessive sophistication of culture produced a society focused on art and pleasure rather than efficiency and technology. In an essay published around the same time in Mita bungaku, ‘Suitai-ki no

167「江戸時代の遺風として其の当時の風呂屋には二階があって、其処には白粉を塗った女が入浴の男を捕へて戯れたと云ふ。わが江戸衰亡期の妖艶なる時代の色彩を想像すると、よく西洋の画にかかれた美女の群の戯れ遊ぶ浴殿の歓楽さへして羨むには当たるまい。」

96 ukiyoe’ (The Ukiyo-e From the Decadent Period, 1914), Kafū argues that the apex of Edo culture can be found during its last decades, just before its fall. The Decadent Edo comes to represent the ideal place where the artist is free to delight in his own senses. In the short story Kanraku (Pleasures, 1909), Kafū draws the following portrait of his experience of the old city’s culture.

One night, [...] a geisha loved me. [...] For the first time I understood how much my body and soul were sensitive to the pleasures provoked by the stimuli of the outside world. The moonlight and the sound of the rain, they take on new colours and resound in new ways when one is in love. The sound of the shamisen being heard faintly from a distant room of the teahouse, deep into the night, evokes the story of a tragic love affair from feudal times ending in blood (KZ, vol. 6, p. 13).168

According to Edward Seidensticker, ‘the Edo of [Kafū’s] dreams became a place of beauty without fathers; and his father, neither wholly new not wholly old, a sort of distillation of what he most disliked in the Meiji Period’ (Seidensticker, 1965, p. 6). The roughness of the ‘feudal times’ are but a titillating souvenir in Kafū’s Edo, and he imagines Edo as this impossible place where someone like himself could enjoy individual freedom without being hindered by the non-individualistic surrounding society. Edo is thus Decadent in the good way, just like the Decadent writers are: sophisticated and pleasure oriented; Tokyo is decadent in the wrong way, with its obsession for progress that has forsaken what it means to practice art and the art of living alike. Kafū’s infatuation with an idealised Edo thus does also contain some nostalgia for a less progressive social order, where ‘cultural aristocrats’ can thrive without having to compete with the masses. In the novel Reishō (Sneers, 1910), the narrator comments as follows.

What a time of rich colours and harmonious order the Edo period was! It

168 「ある夜 [...] ある芸者が私を愛したのだ。[...] 私は其の時始めて、私の身体と精神とが外界の刺戟に呼び起される快感に対して、どれ程の感受性を持って居るかを確めた。月の光も雨の音も、恋してこそ始めて新しい色と響を生ずる。料理屋の夜深けに遠くの座敷で弾く三絃の音は、封建時代の血なまぐさい恋の末路を目に見る如く描き出させる。」

97 had something much better than what the most powerful Western countries of today have, and was in no way inferior to the greatness of the time of Louis XIV that historians so praise. [...] If Parisians [...] build restaurants in the leafy shade of the outskirts, the people of Edo enjoyed spending time by the river. When I think about the Sumida river of old, full of stylish leisure boats, I have nothing to envy to the Seine river of today. [...] Ah! The times of Edo! (KZ, vol. 7, pp. 56-57)169

The double comparison Kafū makes here is rather complex. Edo is first deemed comparable to seventeenth century France, when the country was experiencing the height of its court culture under an absolutist regime. The Edo lifestyle is then compared to the contemporary Parisian lifestyle of the Third Republic. This illustrates that Kafū does not so much position Edo in a specific moment in time as outside any strict historical timeline. This is one of the reasons why, as Katō Shūichi remarks, Kafū’s Edo fantasy cannot be associated to the ‘return to Japan’ that would prove very attractive to numerous Japanese writers, especially from the 1930s onwards.170

There certainly were writers who used to be infatuated with everything Western in their youth, who only studied Western culture, and who, as they got older, started getting interested in Japan and accomplished their ‘return to Japan’. However, it should be quite obvious that for Kafū, things were not so simple. [...] The explanation according to which Kafū evolved from worshipping French culture to a return to Japan does not work. [...] I think that for Kafū, the culture of Edo presented a substitute for French culture (Katō, 2004, pp. 192-193).171

169 「江戸時代はいかに豊富なる色彩と渾然たる秩序の時代であったらう。今日欧州の最強国よりも遥に優る処があって、又史家の嘆賞する路易十四世の御代の偉大に比するも遜色なき感がある。[...] 巴里人 [...] が郊外の緑陰に料理屋を建てるならば、江戸の人は其れをば好んで掘割のほとりに択んだ。洒々たる屋根舟の往来する隅田川の昔を思へば、何ぞ徒に今日のセーヌ河を羨まうや。[...] ああ江戸時代なるかな。」 170 ‘Return to Japan (Nihon e no kaiki)’ is an expression made famous by the 1938 essay by Hagiwara Sakutarō, where the poet argued that Japanese writers should ‘awaken from what he termed an intoxicating dream of the West’, in order to rebuild an authentically Japanese culture that had been neglected and abandoned (Seiji Lippit, 2002, p. 199). 171 「若い時には西洋のことにかぶれ、西洋のことを勉強して、年を取ると日本のことに興味を持つようになって戻ってくるのが日本回帰なら、たしかにそういう人もいると思います。しかし荷風の場合は

98 Katō Shūichi argues that Kafū’s love of France always harmoniously coexisted with his love of Edo; Edo, re-invented into a land of aesthetic individualism and artistic and sexual freedom, provided Kafū with the same symbolic escape from Meiji society that French literature did. Kafū repeatedly compares Edo and Paris and sees their similarities in the way the two cities are organised around the worship of art and beauty. This is apparent for instance in this other passage from Reishō, where the protagonist takes a walk in the old neighbourhoods of Tokyo.

On another day, he and Nakatani went walking east of the river, through Mukōjima and the Kameido. In all the Shinto shrines along the way, and there were many of them, the votive halls were hung with poetic epigrams. In Buddhist temples similar epigrams were carved in countless numbers on garden stones. He thought to himself that the pleasure, though it took a somewhat different form, was like that of roaming the parks and the cemeteries of Paris and reading poetic inscriptions on old tombstones and memorials. He saw how heavily the man of Edo had depended upon art to break the monotony of his life (KZ, vol. 7, p. 56).172

The way Kafū thus re-visits Edo through the lens of French Decadence needs to be understood within a larger context where Japanese started looking back at their past inspired by Western ideas of culture and history. According to Chelsea Foxwell,

it could be said that Japanese modernity took shape in relation to an outside audience that was envisioned as being present to see and evaluate the Asian nation. [...] From the late-nineteenth-century American and European points of view [...] Japan’s drastic changes also threatened to undermine what was most admirable about Japanese culture. Foreigners

そう簡単ではないということが分かるはずです。[...] フランス文化崇拝から日本に回帰したという解釈は成り立たないと思います。[...] 荷風の江戸文化というのは、おそらく、一面ではフランスの文化の代用品だと思います。」

99 were the first to cast Japanese cultural change primarily in terms of loss. [...] By 1900, Japan was engaged in “self-museumification,” housing the Japanese past in Western-style institutions and actively contributing to the process by which “Japan itself came to be perceived as an aesthetic object” [from Karatani Kōjin’s essay ‘Japan as Art Museum’]’ (Foxwell, 2009, pp. 39-40).

The Decadent phenomenon clearly participates in this shift of perception towards Japan’s own past, now rated according to a hierarchy of values inspired by European writers. For the aestheticising gaze alluded to here to take place, a distance between gazing subject and the gazed object needs to be established. It thus makes sense that the way the Japanese Decadents such as Kafū re-invested Edo with a new meaning borrowed not only from European Decadence in general but also from the way Japan was perceived by the European Decadents in particular. In the following part of the dissertation, I focus on the position of Japanese Decadence towards the objectifying gaze that characterises the Decadent’s attitude towards his own homeland and foreign countries alike.

172 「在日中谷に連れられて向島から亀井戸の方まで散歩した時、其の辺の到る処、神社や絵馬堂には連歌の額が掛けてあるし、寺の庭には俳句を刻した石碑の数知れず建てられてあるのを見て、紅雨は形式こそ違いへ、どうしても巴里の公園や墓地を散歩して墓標や記念像の石台に刻された古人の詩句をさぐるに等しい趣のある事を感じた事である。江戸人はいかに其の実生活の単調に対する慰藉を芸術によって仰ぎつゝあったかを知った事である。」Translation by Edward Seidensticker (Seidensticker, 1965, p. 38).

100 PART TWO A PERMANENT EXILE

In his seminal essay Extraterritorial, George Steiner sees ‘the language revolution’ happening in the 1890s as a crucial turning point within European literature, a moment of ‘change in speech awareness, of [...] change in the ways culture inhabits language’ (Steiner, 1968, p. viii). Inspired by Adorno’s analysis of Heine’s cultural and linguistic hybridity, Steiner identifies ‘the emergence of linguistic pluralism or “unhousedness”’173 as the distinctive trait of a new breed of writers who ‘stand in a relation of dialectical hesitance not only toward one native tongue — as Hölderlin or Rimbaud did before them — but toward several languages’ (Steiner, 1968, p. viii). These writers are also characterised by their mobility. Used to travelling and switching from one language to the other, they physically inhabit the paratopic space that opens to the one who is ‘rootless because so variously at home’ (Steiner, 1968, p. 5) or, one may add, at home only in a permanent exile.174 For Steiner, one of the main representatives of this ‘unhoused’ literature is Nabokov, about whom he writes:

A great writer driven from language to language by social upheaval and war is an apt symbol for the age of the refugee. No exile is more radical, no feat of adaptation and new life more demanding. It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization [...] which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely [...], Nabokov remains, by virtue of his extraterritoriality, profoundly of our time [...] (Steiner, 1968, p. 11).

The ‘unhoused’ poet is a wanderer not only because physical exile has been forced upon him but, on a more fundamental level, because modernity means that the artist

173 Steiner quotes Adorno: ‘“The fluency and clarity which Heine appropriated from current speech,” says T. W. Adorno, “is the very opposite of native ‘at-homeness’ (Geborgenheit). Only he who is not truly at home inside a language uses it as an instrument.”’ (Steiner, 1968, p. 5) 174 On paratopia, see the Introduction to this thesis.

101 can no longer pretend to comfortably reside within one homogeneous language that would be unequivocally his; the simple transparency between words and objects stated by Cartesian logic has been irremediably clouded. Decadence is also an experiment in this increasingly complex relationship to language, as Gautier was already expressing in his 1868 essay on Baudelaire: ‘This style of decadence is the last word of the Verb, summoned to express all and to venture to the extreme (Ce style de décadence est le dernier mot du Verbe sommé de tout exprimer et poussé à l’extrême outrance)’ (Gautier, 1978, p. 171). In the following two chapters, I argue that the case of the Japanese Decadents introduced in Part One presents many similarities to this description of the ‘unhoused’ poet, despite the fact that historical circumstances they knew never turned them into ‘refugees’, their exile being thus seemingly less radical. However, in the new Japan that emerges from two consecutive wars (the 1894-1895 First Sino-Japanese War and the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War) deeply affected by political upheaval and social tensions (the 1910-1911 High Treason Incident being a major crisis point), writers were violently confronted with the necessity to re-position themselves toward Japan and the world, and with their own shifting identities. Decadence is a way to claim the writer’s necessary exile (be it physical and/or symbolic) in terms of aesthetic resistance toward the major trends and dominant values of contemporary society. The ‘nostalgic and deliberately untimely’ quality Steiner writes about can thus be analysed as a deliberate strategy to escape the ‘natural’ allegiances (mainly to family and homeland) that society expects their members to honour. In Chapter Three, I draw my inspiration from Rimbaud’s famous quote ‘Je est un autre (I is another)’ to express how the Decadent writer needs to distance himself from his native society in order to reinvent himself as his own individual artistic creation. I show how within this creative enterprise, cultural and linguistic hybridisation plays a central role without being devoid of major ideological ambiguities. This leads me to question in Chapter Four the relation of the Japanese Decadent toward the literary discourses of otherness in French Décadence, characterised by a fascination-repulsion towards the exotic that crystallises at the turn of the century around the notions of Orientalism and Japonism.

102 CHAPTER THREE ‘The Decadent is Another’: The Aesthetics of Not Belonging

O poor lover of chimerical lands! Must he be put in irons, thrown into the sea, The drunken sailor, inventor of the Americas, Which mirage makes the gulf bitterer?

Like the old vagabond tramping through the mud, Dreams with his nose in the air of brilliant paradises; His bewitched eye discovers a Capua Wherever a candle lights up a slum (Baudelaire, 1961, p. 156).175

‘The last poem of Les Fleurs du mal from 1861, ‘Le Voyage’, proclaims the credo of the anti-modern. Contrary to the traditionalist, who has roots, the anti-modern has no place, no table, no bed,’ writes Antoine Compagnon (Compagnon, 2005, p. 22).176 Compagnon identifies the culture of the émigrés that arose — in places such as Koblenz and London — following the massive exile of French aristocrats during the Revolution as the starting point for romanticising the absence of a home within French literature. If Chateaubriand, an actual aristocrat and émigré, appears as one of the founders of the trend, it was taken over by numerous non-aristocratic writers during the second half of the nineteenth century, Stendhal and Baudelaire being among the most prominent (Compagnon, 2005, p. 22). In Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’, the constant need for travel that inhabits the poet is presented as both a blessing and a curse. His ‘bewitched eyes’ have the capacity to transform sordid reality into ‘brilliant paradises’, but — in the same way that in ‘L’Albatros’, ‘when exiled on earth’ the poet’s ‘giant wings prevent him from walking’ —, this puts him at odds with his fellow human beings. The poet is

175 ‘Ô le pauvre amoureux des pays chimériques ! / Faut-il le mettre aux fers, le jeter à la mer, / Ce matelot , inventeur d’Amériques / Dont le mirage rend le gouffre plus amer ? / Tel le vieux vagabond, piétinant dans la boue, / Rêve, le nez en l’air, de brillants paradis ; / Son oeil ensorcelé découvre une Capoue / Partout où la chandelle illumine un taudis’. 176 ‘Le dernier poème des Fleurs du mal en 1861, « Le Voyage », énonce le Credo antimoderne. Face au traditionaliste qui a des racines, l’antimoderne n’a ni lieu, ni table, ni lit’.

103 essentially different because his reality is different, he is therefore the other that does not belong to the community of those who, contended by what the modern world has to offer, are satisfied with the place they where born in.

1. The Eternal Foreigner

A similar trend of exile as a starting point for art can be observed within Japanese literature, which makes Maingueneau’s notion of paratopia relevant in a transcultural context. Analysing the 1933 essay by Kobayashi Hideo ‘Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku’ (Literature of the Lost Home), Stephen Dodd (2004) argues that nostalgia for an idyllic native place definitely lost in modernisation has been a prominent theme within Japanese literature from the 1890s onward. In a parallel movement, the experience of otherness through overseas travels plays a key role in shaping the writer’s consciousness of his own difference. Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki both position themselves towards Japanese society through the lens of their very dissimilar but equally life changing sojourns abroad — the former’s an ecstatic parenthesis in a life of duty, the latter’s a bitter reminder of his social inadequacy. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the main actors of Japanese Decadence present themselves as Ōgai’s disciples. In this sense, their experience of Europe often translates into a longing for individual freedom deemed unattainable in repressive Japanese society. I would like to show, however, that self-exclusion from the writer’s native society is a defining trait of Décadence, shared by French and Japanese alike. Decadence aims to open a place spiritually independent from modern society wherever it develops. Rachael Hutchison (2012) and Ikuho Amano (2013) have analysed Kafū’s kichōsha mono or ‘Returnee Stories’ as showing the author’s ‘critical stance against Meiji modernization and hypocrisy, and against what he saw as the destruction of traditional Japanese culture’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 133). As Amano writes,

In Kafū’s view, Meiji civilization is damnable because it not only destroyed indigenous culture but also sustained feudalistic ancien régime without giving credit to individualism. As a kichōsha, he experiences a complicated unsettled identity, and for this reason, he can make no genuine commitment to either epoch but reveals only the excess of self-

104 consciousness through sarcasm, nostalgia, and self-pity. (Amano, 2013, p. 84)

These analyses, that centre mainly on Kafū’s novel Reishō (Sneers, 1909), underline his pessimistic outlook on society and the dejection of the artist surrounded by narrow-mindedness and materialism. However, one may point out that these are general paratopic tropes shared by very different literatures, from Tayama Katai’s I-Novels to the poems of the Pan Society. Is there, therefore, a specifically Decadent inflection to this general discourse of discontent towards modern civilisation? It seems to me that the key lies within the paradox implied but not made explicit in Amano’s quote around the notion of individualism. The Decadent, as an anti-modern, claims artistic loyalty to pre-modern ‘indigenous culture’ while at the same time holding individualism, the primary condition of modernity, as the only value he is willing to live by. He is, therefore, constantly performing the delicate task of presenting himself as totally independent from any bonding ties or obligations but simultaneously, and because of this independence, included within an artistic tradition of freedom and beauty. The Decadent proudly displays his exclusion from contemporary society as a proof of his belonging to what Stendhal names, in English, the ‘happy few’: exclusion is a sign of exclusivity.177 In Kichōsha no nikki (Diary of a Returnee, 1909), Kafū reminisces about his fascination with the West in terms of liberation from his native land while drawing a parallel between himself and other famous exiles:

I loved everything about being abroad. [...] There is no need to lengthily explain. It is easy to imagine, reading the exiled and the wanderer, how strongly soothing the simple word ‘foreign’ can be to he who has always rebelled against the oppression of his native land. Why did the poet Byron, rejecting his own country, die of illness in the faraway land of Greece?

177 Borrowing the expression from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Stendhal dedicates La Chartreuse de Parme ‘To the happy few’, in other words, to the chosen group of elite minds who will understand and appreciate his works.

105 The novelist Stendhal [...] loved Italy and had ‘Milanese’ carved on his tombstone (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 153).178

Such a declaration shows that Kafū does much more than revel in ‘sarcasm, nostalgia and self-pity.’ I would argue that he carefully builds an ethos of the exclusive/excluded. That is to say, far from lamenting his inadequateness within Japanese society, he brandishes it as a badge of honour, presenting his exclusion as a guarantee for his credibility as a Decadent. This appears very clearly in the short story Kanraku (Pleasures, 1909), where the protagonist explains his social failure by his dedication to pure aesthetic form.

Expelled from school, having lost the trust of my parents, and shunned by my friends, there is nothing to soothe me outside the beautiful ‘form’ and the beautiful ‘dream’ that have absolutely nothing in common with the traditional moral and religion that shape Japan (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 14).179

The immediate reason for becoming an outcast given in the story is actually an affair with a geisha. But the protagonist does not challenge the rigid social order that forbids a young man of his status to openly live with a geisha, nor does he call for a change in ‘the traditional moral and religion that shape Japan.’ He sees his exclusion from his society’s moral value as a condition for his pursuit of beauty.

I want to live as an artist who only worships ‘form’. There is neither good nor evil in my eyes. I want to feel unlimited emotions from everything in this world that moves, smells, has colours, makes sounds, and sing about these things with unlimited pleasure (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 18).180

178「外国と云ふ空気全体を愛して居た [...]。多く論ずる必要はあるまい。昔から生れた郷土の迫害を憤つたものの心に、「外国」と云ふ一語は何れだけ強い慰藉であつたらうか、亡命者放浪者の伝記を読めば想像するに難くはあるまい。詩人 Byron は何故に故国の山河を罵って、遠く希臘の陣中に病死したか。小説家 Stendhal は [...] 彼は伊太利を愛して、己れの墳墓にミランの人某と刻せしめた。」 179 「学校は退校される、父母からは信用を失ふ、友人からは擯斥される、而して日本を形造る古今の道徳宗教とは全く一致しない美しい『形』と美しい『夢』より外に私の身を慰めるものはない。」 180 「私は唯だ『形』を愛する美術家として生きたいのだ。私の眼には善も悪もない。私は世のあらゆる動くもの、匂ふもの、色あるもの、響くものに対して、無限の感動を覚え、無限の快楽を以て其れ等を歌つて居たいのだ。」

106 Here, the worship of aesthetic form goes hand in hand with an individualistic stance that privileges pleasures of the senses over any kind of moral system. Such an exclusive focus on pleasure cannot allow for the concessions any relationship requires, let alone a position within society. Just as Huysmans’ hero Des Esseintes ignores the presence of other human beings in order to fully appreciate the delights provided by his senses, Kafū’s protagonist breaks down the pleasure he gets from his relationship with the geisha into multiple sensations from which the woman herself is totally erased.

The smell of flowers. The sound of music. The colour of the lamp shaded by a folding screen. The smell of women, a mix of makeup and sweat. The shape of a chignon that is about to crumble and fall. The shine of a jewel, the polish of nails, the pattern of a dyed yūzen fabric. Such unlimited rapture of sensual pleasures [...]... I was pursuing the vestige of this intoxicating rapture that one cannot experience if not in love, rather than love itself (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 13).181

This focalisation on formal beauty has been identified by Calinescu and Weir as one of the crucial elements of Decadence that they call ‘dehumanisation’, borrowing a concept coined in 1925 by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (Calinescu, 1987, pp. 125-132; Weir, 1995, pp. 15-17). Dehumanisation is

a distortion of natural forms, an obscuring of recognizable, human elements in art, such as straightforward, realistic presentations of human situations in the novel and the drama. [...] Decadence takes up the antiquarian tendency in romanticism but abandons the cult of nature, and this combination of antiquarianism and anti-naturalism is a clear presage, or transitional process, to the dehumanizing hyperculturalism of modernism. (Weir, 1995, pp. 15-16)

181 「花の匂ひ。音楽の響。屏風が包む燈火の色。化粧品と汗とが混ずる女の匂ひ。崩れて落ちかゝる髷の形。指環の光、爪の輝き、友禅の染模様。[...] 無限の恍惚 — 私は実に、恋よりも、恋せざる限りには知る事の出来ない此の恍惚魔酔の跡を追求した [...]。」

107 It is thus part of the Decadent ethos to reject all ‘natural’ bounds with family and homeland in the name of Aestheticism. The short story Kanraku ends with a quote in French from Jean Moréas, which both sums up the protagonist’s credo and clearly displays his intellectual affiliation: ‘Goûtez tous les plaisirs et souffrez tous les maux (Taste all pleasures and suffer all ills).’ (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 41) From these repeated references to European authors and the critique of Meiji Japan, Ikuho Amano concludes that ‘The Westernization of the self [...] entails a process of internalizing the Western gaze.’ Amano agues that Kafū is trapped by the contradiction of being an Asian who wants to see the world through ‘the Western gaze’, and the only way to sustain such an uncomfortable position is to ‘undermine his Asian self’ (Amano, 2013, p. 84-85). It seems to me, however, that Amano, failing to take into account the inherent paradox of an anti-modern individualism, greatly simplifies Kafū’s ethos of exclusion. I see no evidence of Kafū ‘undermin[ing] his Asian self’ — Amano gives no example to illustrate this point — and it is a mistake to assume that refusing to belong to his native milieu automatically equals claiming membership to ‘the West’. What Kafū’s texts are doing, in my view, is summoning a network of writers and artists, many of them indeed French, within which the author includes himself. In other word, Kafū claims his belonging to an imagined community where each member shares a sense of unity constructed through certain discursive and literary strategies. In this case, similarly minded individuals — the ‘happy few’ — associate freely through their shared worship of the ‘form’. This self-presentation as an outsider implies cutting ties with his natural surroundings (his country and his family) and, in the same movement, joining a community of artists.

I am now utterly indifferent to my family’s original anger towards me, which turned into my expulsion, and finally into their ultimate pity. I am a poet, they are ordinary people. That is to say, we belong to different races. [...] Flaubert said that the artist should not wish to receive the happiness ordinary people expect to receive. We Japanese poets, why should we wish to take wives and build a family? More unpatriotic than criminals, wandering ruffians, these are the titles of honour we for ever should aspire

108 to. [...] Baudelaire’s collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal is my ultimate gospel (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 31).182

Two intertwined communities appear in this extract: the French writers who practice Decadent exclusion from society and ‘we’, the Japanese poets who should follow their example. Thus, what Kafū adamantly rejects are imposed relationships, which one is born into and cannot escape. This is what he writes in Kangokusho no ura (Behind the Prison, 1909), a short story which title can be understood as a metaphor. The protagonist, after his travel abroad, is back to his father’s house, which is situated immediately behind the Ichiya prison in Tokyo.

There is no place more painfully cramped than the place one is born in. [...] There is no relationship more painful and less pleasant than blood relations. Friends, lovers, these relationships can be heavy and painful, but we create them out of our own will. Parents, brothers and sisters, these are innate and we cannot escape them by any means (NKZ, vol. 6, pp. 44- 45).183

The Decadent abhors everything nature imposes and wants to be his own artistic creation. As we have seen, Kafū’s protagonist in Kanraku does not reject the idea of belonging to a community of ‘us’, the Japanese poets who, like himself, position themselves as outsiders. He even actively looks for praise from his fellow artists by going out of his way in order to appear non-conformist:

I would not shy from any victimisation in order to hear such voices [of praise]. In order to write good poems, one needs to love loneliness. One needs to distance oneself from blood relations and from the sanctions of

182 「私は父母親族兄弟の、私に対する最初の憤怒、中途に擯斥、遂には憐憫の情をも、今では全く念頭に置いてゐない。私は詩人だ、彼らは普通の人間である。即ち互に異なる国の種族である。[...] 32 フローベルは藝術家は普通の人の受くべき幸福を受けやうと思つてはならぬと云たつた。況や吾々日本の詩人、どうして妻を娶り家を作るが如き希望を抱き得やう。博徒にも劣る非国民、無頼の放浪者、これが永久吾々の甘受すべき名誉の称号である。[...] ボードレールの詩集『悪の花』は私の無上の福音書で[ある。]」

109 society. One needs to read. One needs to cry. One needs to get drunk. One needs to rejoice... In other words, I became a ruffian in the eyes of my parents and relatives. On a rainy day, I deliberately went to eat my dinner all the way to pubs near the pleasure district. I spent the night on the stairs of the temple in Asakusa (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 17).184

In parallel with the established, bourgeois community into which Kafū was born, lie multiple illegitimate communities of artists, criminals and prostitutes, who find a common ground in their distaste of chastising moral sanctions. Moreover, this same distaste transcends national borders. It is in this sense that Kafū’s Decadent ethos equates to negating his ‘Japaneseness’, but in no way, in my view, out of self-loathing. As underlined by Jay Rubin, Kangokusho no ura displays strong anti-Japanese feelings, and the short stories of this period such as Kanraku, were often censored by the Meiji government (Rubin, 1984, pp. 120-125). One famous passage reads as follows.

Shall I become an artist? No. Japan is Japan, it is not the West. Not only does Japanese society not require artists, it treats them as a nuisance. If the state created this threatening education system and forces us to pronounce strange sounds such as T, V, D, F, that we people of Yamato had never heard before — and those who fail to pronounce them see their right to exist within Meiji society denied —, it is to make us invent I don’t know what kinds of torpedoes and guns, and in no way to let us sing the poems of Verlaine and Mallarmé, and certainly not in order for us to chant the revolutionary song La Marseillaise or the anti-militaristic hymn Internationale (NKZ, vol. 6, p. 48).185

183 「生れた土地ほど狭苦しい処はない。人間が血族の関係ほど重苦しく不快極りなきものは無い。親友にしろ、恋人にしろ、其の関係は、如何に余儀なくとも、堅くとも、苦しくとも、そは自個が一度び意識して結んだものです。親兄弟、こればかりは先天的に、どんな事をしても断ち得ないものです。」 184 「私はこの声の為めにはいかなる犠牲をも厭はないと思つた。よき詩を作るには寂寞を愛さねばならぬ。血縁の係累、社会の制裁から隔離せねばならぬ。読まねばならぬ。泣かねばならぬ。酔はねばならぬ。喜ばなければならぬ—私は乃ち父母親戚の目からは言語同断の無頼漢になつた。私は長雨の夕暮を、遊廓に近い場末の居酒屋に、わざゝ晩飯を食ひに行つた事もある。浅草の観音堂の階段に夜明をした事もある。」 185 「藝術家とならうか。いや。日本は日本にして、西洋ではなかった。これは日本の社会が要求せぬばかりか、寧ろ迷惑とするものである。国家が脅迫教育を設けて、吾々に開闢以来大和民族が発音した事のない、Ｔ、Ｖ、Ｄ、Ｆ、なぞから成る怪音奇声を強ひ、もし此れを発し得ずんば明治の社会に生存の資格なきまでに至らしめたのは、蓋し、他日吾々に何々式水雷とか鉄砲とかを発明させるが主眼であ

110 Here Kafū chooses his side: poetry over materialism. If this opposition does not immediately translate in a dichotomy between Japan and the West, as we have seen, Japan is most often associated with the latter while the references used clearly identify France with the land of art and freedom.

2. France: the Promised Land

Is it the sheer foreignness of France that thus attracts the Japanese artist? Why is France singled out as a land where one is not tied down by social codes and moral values? The universal attraction Paris exercised over writers and artists during the nineteenth century is well documented. In one of the main pieces of research on the subject, Pascale Casanova notices that

As the capital of France, Paris combined two sets of apparently antithetical properties, in a curious way bringing together all the historical conceptions of freedom. On the one hand, it symbolized the Revolution, the overthrow of the monarchy, the invention of the rights of man — an image that was to earn France its great reputation for tolerance toward foreigners and as a land of asylum for political refugees. But it was also the capital of letters, the arts, luxurious living, and fashion. Paris was therefore at once the intellectual capital of the world, the arbiter of good taste, and (at least in the mythological account that later circulated throughout the entire world) the source of political democracy: an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived (Casanova, 2004, p. 24).

As underlined in the Introduction, Casanova’s seminal study fails to take into account a non-European perspective. How did the Parisian myth of tolerance and freedom echo within Meiji Japan? There is indeed a fundamental contradiction in the Japanese Decadent’s admiration for Europe: progress, materialism, industrialisation, all these ills that made Meiji society be so harshly condemned, mainly come from the

つて、決してヴェルレーヌやマラルメの詩なぞ歌はせる為めではなく、革命の歌マルセイエーズや、軍隊開放の歌アンテルナショナルを唱へしめる為めでは、猶更ない。」

111 West. We shall see later how Kafū, following Pierre Loti’s lead, identifies the ‘Anglo- Saxon race’ and above all the U.S. as the source of the modernity he abhors. France, on the contrary, is deemed to have achieved the enviable synthesis of individualism and Aestheticism. I would like to explore some of the reasons behind this image and its significance within Japanese decadence. Kafū’s generation was not the first to experience the West: the generation of his father, who was instrumental in implementing the Meiji Restoration in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, had already taken the habit of traveling abroad in order to bring back knowledge. However, as Miura Nobutaka remarks, France was not the privileged destination for this first generation of young Meiji bureaucrats and businessmen. From 1878 to the end of the Meiji era, the official figures of the Ministry of Education (monbushō) for the Japanese students sent abroad show 209 for Germany, 38 for the UK, 24 for the U.S., and 16 for France (Miura, 2004, p. 14). The failed war against Prussia, and the continued internal tensions following the Commune had indeed damaged France’s reputation in the 1870s. One clear illustration of France falling into disgrace with the Japanese state may be seen in the Civil Code Controversy (minpōten ronsō) that took place between 1893 and 1898, where Germanophile traditionalists eventually prevailed over Francophile liberals (Epp, 1967, pp. 15-48). The Prussian Reich became from then on a main reference point for the Meiji government, which officially favoured authoritarianism over individual freedom. In the same way, if Kafū was the first main Japanese writer to travel to France from 1907 (Miura, 2004, p. 13), Ōgai and Sōseki had preceded him as famous returnees, but not from France. Ōgai stayed in Germany for three years from 1884, and Sōseki in England from 1900. Moreover, both were sent and financed by the government while Kafū chose to go to France of his own accord and used private funds. This pattern of self-financed, self-planned travels to France can be observed among numerous writers following Kafū, among them Yosano Tekkan (1911-1913), Shimazaki Tōson (1913-1916), or Kaneko Mitsuharu (1919-1921). These elements help to understand the specific attraction France had for the artists of the second generation of Meiji, beyond its general international aura as the country of art and freedom. As Kan Nozaki puts it, ‘France gave a less official example: in the eyes of the young Meiji generation, France was not directly linked to the rise of militarism and bureaucratism, of which they were starting to feel the

112 pressure’ (Nozaki, 2012, p. 131).186 The generational gap between Kafū, attracted to individualism and personal well-being, and his father, entirely dedicated to the duties of his social and commercial function, is clearly expressed in Kichōsha no nikki (Diary of a Returnee, 1909). ‘There is no country where the changes of time are felt more violently than in Japan,’ he writes. He goes on to compare his father’s letters to his own, the former using stiff traditional polite greetings while Kafū feels that the ‘most natural’ way to address his father would be by using Western-style formulas expressing affection, such as ‘My dear father’ and ‘Your affectionate son’ (in English in the text). He concludes: ‘What a difference [between the two of us]! It is almost comical’ (KZ, vol. 6, p. 154).187 France represented an alternative for the young generation of Meiji that went along perfectly with their desire to be excluded from the hierarchical and orderly modern society their fathers had exerted themselves to build. As Watanabe Kazutami underlines, ‘France appeared to these writers and artists, excluded from society because they refused to serve its pragmatic interests (especially financial), as the ideal country of freedom, the opposite of the authoritarian State of Meiji’ (Watanabe, 2003, p. 20). 188 He quotes Kaneko Mitsuharu’ memoirs Nemure Pari (Sleep, Paris) as illustrating the image France had in Japan at the time: ‘During this period, when the echo of the Japanese victory over Russia was still heard, those who wanted to leave for the despised France [ninki no nai Furansu] were considered as cowards or sexually deviant’.189 Kaneko’s account of the ‘despised France’ thus works according to the excluded/exclusive dynamics identified above: the more France was rejected as a suitable model for development from the Meiji mainstream society and the government, the more what the country stood for appeared desirable to the writers and artists who took pride in their independence and free spirit.

186 ‘La France donnait un exemple moins officiel : aux yeux de la jeune génération de Meiji, elle n’était pas directement liée à la montée du militarisme et du bureaucratisme, dont elle commençait elle-même à sentir plus ou moins la pression’. Nozaki’s italics. 187 「時代の変遷を此くまで激しく感じる処は、世界中日本を除いては何処にもあるまい。[...] 自分は、英語の My dear father を取つて直ちに、親愛なる父よ、と呼びかけ、Your affectionate son おん身の愛する子よりと結びたい。それが親子の感情を発表する最も自然な書き方であると信ずる。何たる相違であらう、寧ろ滑稽と云ふべきだ。」 188 ‘La France est donc apparue à ces littérateurs et artistes, exclus de la société car ils ne servaient pas ses intérêts pragmatiques (notamment financiers), comme le pays idéal de la liberté, aux antipodes de l’Etat autoritaire de Meiji’. 189 ‘A cette époque où l’on pouvait encore sentir la victoire du Japon dans la guerre russo-japonaise de manière très palpable, on considérait comme des couards ou des obsédés sexuels tous ceux qui voulaient partir pour la méprisable France.’ Quoted by Watanabe Kazutami (2003, p. 20), his French translation. ‘Ninki no nai Furansu’ literally means ‘the unpopular France’.

113 As Pascale Casanova writes, Paris thus stood for ‘an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived.’ Whether France actually offered an ideal context for artistic freedom — and it seems that, relatively speaking, it did to some extent — matters relatively little here: I am interested in how this myth was crafted and developed so as to resonate so strongly among the Japanese writers of the 1900s. It is indeed prior to his actual experience of France that Kafū writes about his longing for the artistic freedom the country offers. At the end of Amerika monogatari, the narrator entirely focuses on his desire to see France that has been aroused by the literary representations of the country he has been reading and, as Rachael Hutchinson shows, his rendition of France during his actual sojourn there deliberately keeps his experience within the realm of artistic recreation of the real.

The “France” of Furansu monogatari would come to efface reality almost completely. [The stories] [...] are almost overwhelmed by the artistic legacy of the capital city. [...] The countryside hardly seems natural — the fields, the cows on the banks of rivers, the groves of trees and so on “were exactly like those I had seen in oil paintings for so many years.” The red- tile roofs of the country houses also have the narrator sighing in envy: “Ah, how the people who live here are the citizens of paradise!” (Hutchison, 2012, pp. 59-62)

The ‘red-tile roofs of the country houses’ are nothing extraordinary in themselves, and Kafū does not pretend that they are. But they belong to ‘paradise’ because they have been magnified through being represented in art, therefore extracted from the purely material to join a superior kind of beauty. France in these writers’ eyes is doubly artistic: its society values art and, more importantly, it exists first and foremost as art. The major role Naturalism played in the Japanese reception of French literature during Meiji has already been alluded to in the second chapter. At the time Kafū went to France, he was thoroughly familiar with writers such as Zola and Maupassant. 190 But in parallel with the Naturalists’ somewhat gruesome rendering of the city, texts celebrating the Parisian hedonistic

190 He wrote a Japanese version of Nana in 1903, Joyū Nana (Nana the Actress); the text retracing his visiting the monument erected in Maupassant’s honour, Mōpassan no sekizō o haisu (Worshipping the Stone Monument to Maupassant, 1909), is famous.

114 bohemian life-style were also widely read in Japan. Imahashi Eiko highlights the impact of novels such as Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851) on the Meiji artistic avant-garde.191 The life of Parisian artistic milieu as popularised by Murger was made all the more appealing at the very beginning of the century by the art critic Iwamura Tōru’s series of novels and essays, among the most famous Pari no bijutsugakusei (The Parisian Art Student, 1901) and Shōsetsu to bijutsuka seikatsu (Novels and the Artists’ Lifestyle, 1902) (Imahashi, 1993, pp. 68-69; Noda, 1976, pp. 16-17).192 The bohemian is an ideal figure for the artist because he has no roots and is not bound to any social function: he is by essence paratopic. As such, he plays a role within the Decadent imagination. As David Weir analyses,

As an aesthetic category, decadence is situated somewhere between romantic bohemia and avant-garde belle époque. [...] The bohemian artist is always at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, either in reality or imagination. The belle époque, on the other hand, is more conductive to aristocratic pretensions [...]. Sometimes the decadent may pursue a bohemian life-style, but always imagine himself a cultural aristocrat, while being, at base, thoroughly bourgeois (Weir, 1995, p. xv).

This description of the bourgeois bohemian suits Kafū and his fellow Francophile writers well, and I will come back to the idea through the notion of cosmopolitism below. My point here is that by the time Kafū went to France, the country was already strongly associated with individualism and freedom. In Furansu monogatari, Kafū can thus claim France for himself as the rightful homeland of the free artist that he aspires to be:

One says that there is always a gap between the imagination and the reality of the traveller, but the France I actually saw was even more

191 On the novel and its significance in shaping the image of Paris, see also Jerrold Seigel (1986). 192 Kafū writes about his attraction to the Bohemian way of life in Hebi-tsukai (The Snake Charmer): ‘In English, gypsy. In French, bohémien: this race of wanderers [furō jinshu] whom one hears of so often in stories and everyday conversations’ (KZ, vol. 5, p. 180).「英吉利西語でジプシイ。仏蘭西語でボエミヤンなぞと名をつけて、物語にも見日常の雑談にも能く聞く由緒の分からぬ浮浪人種のそれであろう。」On Kafū and bohemia, see Akase Masako (1986).

115 beautiful than the France I had yet to see, and sweeter. Oh my France! I feel as if I was born to this world in order to set my eyes on you! (KZ, vol. 5, p. 266)193

This type of declaration, as extreme as it seems, is not unique to Kafū. Among the many examples she analyses in her study on the subject, Yamada Toyoko quotes Yosano Tekkan’s writings from Paris in 1911. The poet has such a good time during the Carnival in Montmartre that he ‘feel[s] reborn rather than rejuvenated by the innocent pleasure such as [he has] never experienced in [his] 39 years’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 150).194 Upon visiting Rodin’s Parisian garden and being given some roses, he writes to his wife Akiko: ‘Put the ashes of these flowers under the roses in our garden. The Japanese soil will thus be purified’ (Yamada, 2015, p. 163).195 Among these Japanese homages to France of the first half of the twentieth century, the most famous is undoubtedly the first lines of Hagiwara Sakutarō’s 1925 poem ‘Tabidachi’ (Departure):

I would like to go to France But France is so far away! I could at least wear a new suit And depart for a self-indulgent journey.196

These lines show very clearly that France is not so much a place as an idea, the ultimate promise of freedom and pleasure. As such, it can be pursued anywhere: bringing the foreign home is one way to not belong.

193 「旅人の空想と現実とは常に錯誤するというけれど、現実に見たフランスは見ざる以前のフランスよりも更に美しく、更に優しかった。ああ！わがフランスよ！自分はおん身を見んがためにのみ、この世に生れて来た如く感ずる。」「巴里のわかれ」 194 「若返つたと云ふより生まれ変つたと云はうか、三十九年 [...] 全く経験しなかった無邪気な遊びであつた。」Quote by Yamada Toyoko (2015, p. 150). 195 「わが庭の薔薇の下に、この花の灰を撒けよ。日本の土が、之に由りて浄まる。」Quote by Yamada Toyoko (2015, p. 163). 196 「ふらんすへ行きたしと思へども / ふらんすはあまりに遠し / せめては新しき背広をきて / きままなる旅にいでてみん。」

116 3. Domesticating the Foreign: An Aesthetic of Hybridity

The Decadent ethos of ‘exclusive exclusion’ translates into a familiarity for the foreign: the Decadent, as an individualist, does not consider himself bounded by national ties. This is still valid when the writer is within the context of his country of origin, and displays of cultural and linguistic hybridity are part of the decadent aesthetic. The foreign is domesticated in the two meanings of the word: it is brought back home and/or made familiar. The idea of a domesticated foreignness touches upon the main paradox of exoticism: is the other attractive because of his/her impenetrable difference or because he/she expresses in different ways a shared universal humanity? Are these two poles incompatible? In his seminal essay, Victor Segalen argued for a humanistic definition of exoticism as a positive force which would give men ‘the ability to conceive otherwise’, in other words to see the world through the other’s gaze. This implies the delicate balancing act of adopting the other’s position while never negating his/her difference as other; the I needs to become the other, so to speak, and it is easy to understand why exoticism played such a great role within fin de siècle literature obsessed with Rimbaldian self-alienation. On the other hand, what is generally understood as exoticism today is intricately linked with the ethnocentric enterprise of European imperialism, which aims at discarding the other within his/her radical otherness in order to both dominate and consume his/her difference. To these complex negotiations between self and other, Japanese writers offer unique perspectives and solutions. At the beginning of the new century, the Circle of Pan, inspired by a Baudelairian fascination for faraway lands, developed their own take on exoticism. In the years 1907-1910 they chose Kyūshū and, more specifically, the Christian culture that had developed there during the sixteenth century under the influence of Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian missionaries, as their object. 197 This literary manifestation of internal exoticism, albeit short-lived and relatively marginal, deserves attention in the way it manages to foreignise Japan through the

197 The English academic literature on the subject is abundant. See for instance Ikuo Higashibana (2001).

117 domestication of an alien cultural import (Christianity) that took place there, and therefore makes it a suitable object of internal exoticism. Another crucial aspect of the nanban shumi 198 literature that is often overlooked but is in my views essential is that, by focusing on a specifically Japanese Christianity, the poets of the Circle of Pan could emulate the Christian imagery that is narrowly associated with French fin de siècle aesthetic. Indeed, the fact that their interest in the kirishitan culture of Kyūshū came from their readings of French literature cannot be stressed enough. Kinoshita Mokutarō states it very clearly in his memoirs:

The crux that shaped our ideology came from Gautier’s, Flaubert’s, and others’ ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’. Exoticism was central to this ideology from the beginning. It was thus necessary that exoticism also played a role in our own. Of course, European literature itself stood for it, but the nanban style also participated, making it both more familiar and more complex (Noda, 1976, p. 16).199

Moreover, as Hatanaka Yoshie underlines, the scholarly interest during Meiji in Japanese Christianity was also mainly Western (Hatanaka, 2003, pp. 5-6). She presents the role played by the journal Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, created in 1878 by mainly English-speaking expatriates, in drawing attention to a historical episode that was not necessarily deemed especially important by the Japanese themselves. On the contrary, Ernest Satow claimed in an article published in the journal in question that the most interesting historical period of Japan was the time the Portuguese were present on the territory (1542-1640). It is thus through an outside

198 Literally, ‘Southern barbarian style’, or ‘taste’. The term nanban has a long history and shifting definitions that would be too complex to retrace here in detail. Originally used in China to designate non-Han groups of which the most prominent happened to be in the South, it was later also applied to the Manchu in the North, thus meaning ‘barbarian’ in general. In Japan, it designates primarily the Portuguese and Spanish coming to the region of Nagasaki from their colonies in India and South-East Asia in the sixteenth century, but could still be synonymous with ‘foreign’ in the 1900s (Hatanaka 2003, p. 7). 199 「我々の思想の中心を形造ったものは、ゴオチエ、フロオベル等を伝わって来た『芸術の為めの芸術』の思想であった。この思想的潮流には本元でもエキゾチズムが結合した。必然我々の場合にもエキゾチズムが加った。欧羅巴文学それ自身がそれであったが、別に『南蛮趣味』が之に合流して、少しく其音色を和らげ複雑にした。」On the subject, Kinoshita also wrote ‘Meiji matsunen no nanban bungaku’ (The Nanban Literature of the End of Meiji). Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō, May 1942.

118 view that the Japanese came to revisit their Christian past, the Shigakukai zasshi (Journal of the Historical Society) playing a central role from 1889. It was following this renewal that the 1906 exhibition on nanban objects was organised in Ueno, drawing the attention of a larger public and, especially, of a group of Myōjō poets: Yosano Tekkan, Kitahara Hakushū, Yoshii Isamu, Hirano Banri, and Kinoshita Mokutarō. Fascinated by what they saw in Ueno, they decided to go to Kyūshū on an artistic expedition in July 1907.200 Observations, poems and sketches were sent to Tokyo where they were published in Myōjō and later gathered into the collective memoirs Gosoku no kutsu (Five Pairs of Shoes, 1907). Beside this account, the most significant artistic achievement that resulted from the journey is without a doubt Kitahara Hakushū’s maiden volume of poetry, Jashūmon (The Heretics, 1909). Making prolific use of an archaic vocabulary used during the Edo period to transcribe foreign words with Japanese kanji, it focuses on the hybrid Catholicism practised in autarky and in secret after the prohibition of Christianity in 1612. The title of the volume, as well as the first poem ‘Jashūmon hikyoku’ (Secret Song of the Heretics), is thus programmatic: jashū designates any religion that is not authorised by the state, and thus came to be narrowly associated with Christianity in Japan. The first stanza of ‘Jashūmon hikyoku’ has been translated by Donald Keene as follows:

I believe in the heretical teachings of a degenerate age, the witchcraft of the Christian God The captains of the black ships, the marvelous land of the Red Hairs The scarlet glass, the sharp-scented carnation The striped calico of the southern barbarians The arak, the vinho tinto (KHSS, vol. 1, p. 122; Keene, 1984, p. 243).201

Foreign words such as kirishitan (Christian), kahitan (captain), and araki (arak) are all transcribed through ateji, that is to say kanji used phonetically to transcribe

200 For more details, see Noda (1976, pp. 22-85); in English, Donald Keene (1984, p. 240) and Ying Xiong (2014, pp. 76-79). Kinoshita also wrote that the inspiration for going on an artistic expedition came from reading Goethe’s Italian Journey (Noda, 1976, pp. 23-24).

119 loanwords; if some, such as kirishitan, are well known, others appear definitely rare and archaic. The unusual domestication of rare foreign words thus creates a hybrid language that, rather than appearing familiar, enhances the text’s strangeness: neither foreign nor Japanese. Jabeiiru for instance designates the carnation, a flower imported from the Netherlands and called in modern Japanese kānēshon. The foreignness of the flower, rather than being normalised through the use of a foreign word, is here made all the more conspicuous and intriguing by the unusual word in hiragana.202 The poem goes on:

The blue-eyed Dominicans chant their mantra and talk even in their dreams Of the forbidden God, and the bloodied cross. [...] I have heard their cosmetics are squeezed from the flowers of poisonous herbs, And the images of Mary are painted with oil from rotted stones. [...] Oh, vouchsafe unto us, sainted padres of delusion, Though our hundred years be shortened to an instant, though we die on the bloody cross, It will not matter; we beg the Secret, that strange dream of crimson: Jesus, we pray this day, bodies and souls caught in the incense of yearning (KHSS, vol. 1, pp. 122-123).203

It seems very striking to me, even though neither Noda nor Keene ever mention it, that what Kitahara is doing here is appropriating and domesticating the

まつせじゃしゅうきりしたんまはふくろふねかひたんこうまうふかしぎこく 201 「われは思ふ、末世の邪宗、切支丹でうすの魔法。/ 黒船の加比丹を、紅毛の不可思議国を、/ いろあかにほひとなんばんさんとめじまあらきちんた色赤きびいどろを、匂鋭きあんじやべいいる、/ 南蛮の桟留縞を、はた、阿刺吉、珍の酒を。」 202 Donald Keene notices that in The Heretics, the flowers ‘tend to be foreign, acacia, water hyacinths, and heliotropes, but never cherry blossoms’ (Keene, 1984, p. 243). As Ying Xiong writes, ‘Using bizarre characters to translate items foreign to Japan, Kitahara aroused the reader’s sensory impressions of odours, visions, and sounds’ (Ying Xiong, 2014, p. 79). まみだらにずきんせいしゅうもんしん 203「目見青きドミニカびとは陀羅尼誦しし夢にも語る、/ 禁制の宗門神を、あるはまた、血に染むくろすけはひしろどくさうくさあぶらゑがまりやざう聖磔、[...] / あるは聞く、化粧の料は毒草の花よりしぼり、/ 腐れたる石の油に画くてふ麻利耶の像よ、たまげんわくばてれんそんじゃももとせはりきせを [...]」いざさらばわれらに賜へ、幻惑の伴天連尊者、/ 百年をに縮め、血の磔脊にし死すとも / 惜しか

120 imagery developed around Catholicism by French Decadent literature. For its mysticism and glorification of death, Catholicism — and especially its ascetic intellectual version practiced in Spain by Ignatius of Loyola — indeed offers a very attractive aesthetic for the anti-rational and death-obsessed fin de siècle. The fact that in Europe Catholicism was slowly dying under the attacks of the positivist thought made it all the more suitable for the elitist, anti-modern Decadence.204 The key figure here is Huysmans — even though other late nineteenth century writers also wrote extensively on the subject, such as Flaubert in La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). À rebours, written before the author’ conversion in 1893, already abounds in detailed descriptions of Catholic artifact and rituals, and des Esseintes contemplates his own conversion at the end of the novel.

How many times has des Esseintes been enthralled and bent by an irresistible breath, when the ‘Christus factus est’ of the Gregorian chant was rising in the nave [...], or when the faux-bourdon of the ‘De profundis’ was making its lament heard, lugubrious like a contained sob, poignant like the hopeless call from humanity lamenting its mortal destiny, imploring the Saviour’s tender mercy! (Huysmans, 1884, p. 269)205

One of the main attractions of Catholicism — beside its morbidity — thus resided in the usage of Latin, a language both archaic and somewhat exotic — neither totally foreign nor absolutely familiar — which has the power to opacify the transparent rapport with reality that language is supposed to provide in its usual, daily usage; a

くくれなゐぜんすまろけふいのりくゆらじ、願ふは、かの奇しき紅の夢、/ 善主麿、今日を祈に身も霊も薫りこがるる。」Translated by Keene (1984, p. 244) except for the first two lines. 204 As the heir of Romanticism, Decadence inherited its fascination with Catholicism. In his study on Romanticism, Georges Gusdorf recalls Jean Gaulmier (specialist of Volney and Gobineau)’s words ‘the nineteenth century is the great religious century of France (le XIXeme siècle est le grand siècle religieux de la France)’ (Gusdorf, 1995, p. 658). Romanticism, as an anti-Enlightenment reaction, promoted the belief in ‘regeneration through Catholicism’, first put forward in the Schlegel brothers’ magazine Athenaeum and then wildly popularised in France by Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme. (Gusdorf, 1995, p. 725) However, French Romanticism evolved towards liberalism under the influence of figures such as Hugo and Lamartine. 205 ‘Combien de fois des Esseintes n’avait-il pas été saisi et courbé par un irrésistible souffle, alors que le « Christus factus est » du chant grégorien s’élevait dans la nef [...], ou que le faux-bourdon du « De profundis » gémissait, lugubre de même qu’un sanglot contenu, poignant ainsi qu’un appel désespéré de l’humanité pleurant sa destinée mortelle, implorant la miséricorde attendrie de son Sauveur !’ À rebours, chapter 15. On fin de siècle Catholicism, see Barbara Beaumont (1989).

121 strikingly similar phenomenon to what we observe in Jashūmon’s transcription of archaic loanwords with Japanese characters.206 Moreover, Huysmans and the Decadents made an extensive use of Catholicism’s chastising views on earthly pleasures in order to enhance their attraction, according to the universal logic according to which what is forbidden is desirable. This is especially true of his novel Là-bas (1891), the last book written before the author’s conversion, explored in the trilogy En route (1895), La Cathédrale (1898), and L’Oblat (1901). Catholicism and its antithesis, Satanism, are used to magnify sensory pleasures into forbidden, highly sought-after, and dangerous currency. For the poets of nanban literature, there is no need to look so far as Satanism: the whole Catholic imagery in itself is adorned with the lures of prohibition, secrecy, and exclusivity. In this sense, the shogunate’s ban on Catholicism is, if one may say so, a godsend for Japanese decadence. The hybridisation of the poetic language seemed to have been the acknowledged aim of the Kyūshū trip. As Hatanaka remarks, ‘the aim to collect nanban-related vocabulary during the trip is clearly stated in Gosoku no kutsu’ (Hatanaka, 2003, p. 9).207 She is referring to a passage most probably written by Kinoshita Mokutarō, according to Noda (1976, p. 43)208:

Today, while working around the town, we tried to find as many Japanized foreign words as possible, but to no great success. There were probably many in Nagasaki in the past, but nowadays when the spread of civilisation is fast, they are only used in the most remote areas. Bōura (pumpkin), konobue (spider web), totsuchingyō (tree top) are some examples (Noda, 1976, p. 43).209

206 Donald Keene thus writes that ‘The profusion of foreign words, most transcribed in perversely bizarre Chinese characters, creates the impression of a marvelously strange world, imagined in terms of odors, colors, and sounds entirely unlike those of traditional Japan.’ Of another poem, he writes, ‘[it] combines a fin-de-siècle unhealthiness with the sound of a foreign musical instrument [...] to create an “oriental” scene’ (Keene, 1984, p. 244 and p. 28). 207 「『五足の靴』の旅において、南蛮関係の語彙を収集しようとする意図がかなり明確に示されている[...]。」 208 Gosoku no kutsu is a collective work which articles, poems etc. are not signed. 209 「今日町を歩き乍ら、出来る丈外国語の日本化したものを探さうとしたが、余り集まらなかった。昔は長崎に多かったらうが、文明の伝播の早い今日は、比較的に不便な此地あたりに最も多く残ってゐるらしい。ボーウラ（南瓜）コノブエ（蜘蛛の巣）トツチンギョウ（木の梢）の如きは其の二三の例だ。」

122 As Meiji Japan thus adopts Western innovations and the linguistic homogeneity deemed suitable to a modern state, it eradicates regional specificities; there is some irony in the fact that in this case these were the result of a past European influence. The keen interest in linguistic exoticism displayed by the Myōjō poets is re- iterated by Kitahara Hakushū in a 1942 article:

Our nanban taste was not scholarly, nor did it come from an interest in history [...]: it was solely based on collecting vocabulary. We were inspired by the Parnassian and Symbolist poetry that had been introduced in Japan. Ueda Bin’s Kaichōon and Kanbara Ariake’s Shunchōshū greatly influenced us (Noda, 1976, p. 81).210

The massive import of foreign cultures that characterises Meiji offered an ideal context for these poets in search of new linguistic possibilities, and one may argue that they brought the linguistically hybrid element in their poetry further than French Symbolism ever did. The poems of the Circle of Pan thus display an extraordinary creativity when it comes to mixing languages and graphics. Here are some verses metaphorically describing their gatherings, from a poem titled in French ‘Présentation’ written by Takamura Kōtarō and published in Subaru in 1911:

Pan’s lantern oscillates under the breeze blowing from the liquor jar, It wavers and flickers gently. Scent of bergamot and plum. [...] Pan, with grapes crowning his bearded face, Opens his arms that look like flames and [says] “Permettez moi de vous présenter…” (Noda, 1976, pp. 171-172)211

210 「われわれの南蛮趣味は学問的でも、考証的でも [...] なく、専ら語彙の集積でした。是れは当時日本に紹介されたパルナシアンの詩、サムボリストの詩からも暗示を受けたわけです。上田敏氏の『海潮音』、蒲原有明氏の『春鳥集』がわれわれに大きな影響を與へました。」On the two volumes of poetry mentioned here, see Part 1. 211 「パンの提灯が酒壺から吹く風に揺れて、/ ゆらりと動き、はらりと動く。/ ベルガモオ [sic] の匂と、巴旦杏の匂と。[...] 頭に葡萄を載せたパンの髯面が、/ 火の様な手を出して、/ [...] ‘Permettez moi de vous présenter…..’」

123 The last line is in French, in Roman alphabet. The second line uses typically Japanese phenomimes (gitaigo) to describes the movements of the lantern, while the third line significantly juxtaposes a foreign plant, the bergamot (called by its foreign name transcribed in katakana), to a uniquely Sino-Japanese plant, hattankyo (Prunus salicina or Japanese plum), transcribed in kanji. One of the archetypal poems of the Circle of Pan is Kinoshita Mokutarō’s ‘Kinpunshu’ (Gold dust liquor), published first in 1910 in Mita bungaku and later added to the volume Shokugo no uta (Songs for after a meal, 1917). As both titles show, the aim of this poetry is to celebrate the pleasures of the senses in particular and the lifestyle of a hedonistic Decadent in general.212 Linguistic and cultural hybridity is here too shown as being inseparable from such a lifestyle. Here are the first and last stanzas:

Eau-de-vie de Dantzick Liquor with floating specks of gold Oh! May, May, liquor glass, My bar’s stained glass Purple rains on the city.

[...]

Oh! May, May, your voice A flute playing under the sweet paulownia flowers, The softness of a young black cat’s fur, The shamisen of Japan melts my heart. Eau-de-vie de Dantzick (KMZ, vol. 1, pp. 170-171).213

212 On the fusion of life and art practiced by the Circle of Pan, see Chapter 2. オオドヰイドダンチツクこがねリケエルグラスバアステエンドギラス 213 「Eau-de-vie de Dantzick / 黄金浮く酒 / おお、五月、五月、小酒盞 / わが酒舖の色彩玻璃 / フリウト街にふる雨の紫。[...] おお、五月、五月、そなたの聲は / あまい桐の花の下の竪笛の音色、/ わかとろにっぽんさみせんい黒猫の毛のやはらかさ、/ おれの心を溶かす、日本の三味線。/ Eau-de-vie de Dantzick」The liquor called ‘Eau de vie de Dantizck’ does not seem to exist anymore but seems to have been a golden coloured distilled spirit made in France and Belgium. See www.euvs.org/en/collection/spirits/bottle/eau-de-vie-de-dantzick (last access 28/6/2017). It is mentioned in A rebours for its striking visual aspect (ch. 12; Huysmans, 1884, p. 187).

124 The first and last lines are written in alphabet with ruby in katakana indicating the French pronunciation; many other words, such as ‘bar’, ‘liquor glass’, and ‘flute’ are written in kanji with ateji ruby indicating in katakana the corresponding English word. The poet uses (with some irregularities) the traditional 5/7 foot-verses214 but makes some verses of the first stanza rhyme (a distinctively non-Japanese trait), as can be observed in the alphabetical transcription below:

Ō do vi do danchikku Kogane uku sake Ō, gogatsu, gogatsu, rikēru gurasu Waga bā no sutēndo gurasu Machi ni furu ame no murasaki.

Another remarkable feature of the poem is the line ‘The shamisen of Japan melts my heart’. By specifying the cultural origin of this typically Japanese instrument, the poet positions himself outside the cultural space where no one would ever think of pointing out that shamisen is, indeed, a Japanese lute. He therefore signals his freedom towards any cultural bounds — and especially his native place — while showing his deep artistic sensitivity towards anything beautiful, regardless of its origins. Beside what may be called, using a term defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, the ‘intentional hybridity’ of their poetic language (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 259-422), the Circle of Pan also had an explicit cosmopolitan ideal that they practiced by opening up their gatherings to foreigners travelling to Tokyo.215 The Circle had one non- Japanese constant member, a German art student named Fritz Rumpf. Even though he seems to have been a mediocre poet, he published in the art magazine Okujō teien in 1909 the following German poem, amusing for its use of Japanese words and describing good times spent in Kyoto, called ‘Kyoto Impressionen’:

214 As Donald Keene observes, the ‘modern poetry [shintaishi]’ of the Circle of Pan ‘was generally written in combinations of units in the standard five and seven syllables, though often [it] varied this pattern’ (Keene, 1984, p. 243). 215 As Peter Coulmas underlines in his seminal study on the history of cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan ideal (or normative cosmopolitanism) and practice (descriptive cosmopolitanism) need to be distinguished: an individual, group, or society, can be cosmopolitan without theorising cosmopolitanism as an ideal, and vice versa (Coulmas, 1990, pp. 9-10). On cosmopolitanism and Decadence, see below.

125 Der Kiyomizudera Die Maedchen von Saikyo Und Kyoto bei Mondschein Zuibunkirei — [...]

Musik und Masamune Und huebsche Maedchen Das Abends in Gion Omoshiroi —

Ohne Geld, ohne Tischmusik Ohne Maedchen, ohne Sake Geht’s Morgen nach Tokio Tsumaranai — (Noda, 1976, pp. 250-252)

(The Kiyomizu-dera The young girls from Saikyo And Kyoto under the moonshine Zuibunkirei [Very beautiful] —

[…]

Music and Masamune, And the bonny young girls The evening in Gion Omoshiroi — [Very enjoyable]

With no money, no cocktail music With no young girls, no more sake Tomorrow we go back to Tokyo

126 Tsumaranai — [Very boring])216

‘Masamune’ here is Kinoshita Mokutarō, Rumpf’s close friend. Kinoshita Mokutarō wrote about Rumpf in a poem included in Shokugo no uta’s Preface:

RUMPF you come from a foreign land, But RUMPF you understand our hearts very well. This is because ‘young men’ have no nationality (KMZ, vol. 1, p. 16).217

Here, the cosmopolitan ideal is clearly expressed. Even though what ‘young men’, in quotation marks, designates exactly is difficult to say, one may assume that Kinoshita implies that the young generation they belong to — and the core members of the Circle of Pan were indeed in their early 20s — are animated by a spirit of freedom and adventure that differentiates them from their elders and makes them feel closer to a young German sharing the same interests, rather than to their fellow Japanese in general. Interestingly, the Circle of Pan attracted suspicion and suffered from a bad reputation because of this cosmopolitan spirit. The so-called Black Frame Incident (kuro waku jiken) of November 1911 contributed to the Circle’s disaggregation and eventual demise in 1913. A journalist from the Yorozu chōhō,218 after attending one of the Circle’s gatherings, wrote an article violently accusing the young artists of being ‘un-patriotic’ (hikokumin), a catch-all term used liberally until 1945 to qualify any attitude or discourse deemed contradictory to the State’s interest. The direct reason for such an accusation came from a poster made by the Circle announcing the enlistment of two of their members. The text of the poster was not a problem as it simply stated: ‘Celebrating the conscription of Nagata Hideo and Yanagi Keisuke.’ But the poster

216 On Fritz Rumpf, who seems little known outside of Japan and Germany, see Noda (1976, pp. 243- 257). There are studies on him in German; see Hartmut Walravens (1989). 217 「RUMPF お前は異国の男だ、/ 然し RUMPF お前は熟くおれ逹の心が分かる。/ それは「青年」に国籍がないからだ。」 218 Founded in 1892 by Kuroiwa Ruikō, Yorozu chōhō had an important role in shaping Japanese journalism. It is considered as one of the forerunners of sensationalist journalism (inspired to some extent by American yellow journalism). It would widely mediatise social and political scandals, not hesitating to personally attack members of the political establishment or the aristocracy. Its political orientation varied greatly over time, evolving from anti-militarism before the Russo-Japanese War to a staunch support of Japanese imperialism.

127 was painted black on its frame, thus the name of the ‘incident’. Noda understands this as the Circle implicitly announcing the two members’ temporary ‘death’ to poetry and art, as they would not be able to write or paint while enlisted. The journalist saw it as ‘criticising the citizen’s sacred duty of conscription’ (Noda, 1976, pp. 169-170).219 The moment was unfortunate for the Circle of Pan. 1910-1911 saw the High Treason Incident (taigyaku jiken) throwing the country into a spiral of identity crisis and heightened repression against liberal-minded artists and intellectuals, and these poets with a cosmopolitan aesthetic paid the price because of the increasingly inward looking official ideology.220 One may argue that historical contexts of social tensions and of re-definition of the national identity represent key moments in re-shaping the social position and political representation of the artist in general, as well as in defining Decadence. Indeed, decadence is always relative: relative to what the country/civilisation may have been in the past, and to the various states of progress other countries/civilisations are deemed to have reached. Hence a particularly strong link between the notion of decadence and the representation(s) of otherness, otherness standing for the reference point according to which, or, more often, against which, self-identity defines itself. Cosmopolitanism, as the idea that, as Diogenes put it, every human is first and foremost a ‘citizen of the world’ (kosmopolitês) before being tied to his/her native land, thus seems to be in practice or/and in theory intimately linked to the Decadent exile we have been analysing. The cosmopolitan individual is indeed ‘identifiable by his great mobility, both physical and intellectual, by his faculty to [...] accommodate his/herself with every countries, with various national habits. As a collective phenomenon, the cosmopolitan group is composed of elements from all countries and is also under the influence of numerous countries’ (Hoock-Demarle, 2008, p. 408).221 The cosmopolitan has in other word domesticated the world; he/she is at home wherever he/she goes. Does this mean that for the cosmopolitan, foreignness does not

219 「国民の神聖な義務である徴兵の制度に対しての非難」 220 The High Treason Incident started with the failed socialist-anarchist plot to assassinate the Emperor and was followed by the execution of Kōtoku Shūsui and ten others, and a large-scale repression against dissidents. It had a strong negative impact on a writer such as Kafū who was comforted in his disillusionment with Japanese society and removed himself further from the artistic and intellectual milieu he had been a member of. See his short story Hanabi (Fireworks, 1921). 221 ‘Le cosmopolite, en tant qu’individu, est repérable à sa très grande mobilité tant physique qu’intellectuelle, à sa faculté […] de s’accommoder de tous pays de mœurs nationales variées. Saisi comme phénomène collectif, le groupe cosmopolite se compose d’éléments de tous les pays mais subit aussi l’influence de nombreux pays’.

128 exist? One may argue that cosmopolitanism is a class phenomenon that builds this sense of international belonging by excluding from its field of sociability all individuals who do not inhabit the transnational habitus of the elite.222 Cosmopolitanism’s openness is indeed linked, as Peter Coulmas analyses, to ‘the social refinement which intellectual aspect Horace defines as “nil admirari”; the discrete superiority of the man who has experienced the world and who, contrary to the naïve provincial, cannot be surprised by anything’ (Coulmas, 1995, p. 35).223 Albeit in fin de siècle Europe, cosmopolitanism is mainly associated with sophistication and elitism, it does still retain some of Diogenes’ cynical outlook on society through its (often superficial) non-conformism and disdain for the materialism of the masses. All these elements correspond to what we have identified at the beginning of this chapter as the Decadent ethos of self-exclusion. Decadence and cosmopolitanism are deeply linked in theory as in practice. In his influential essays, Paul Bourget shapes his understanding of decadence alongside a theory of cosmopolitanism. In the chapter ‘Le Cosmopolitisme de Beyle’, in the essay on Stendhal (1882), Bourget mainly praises the afore-mentioned ‘Happy few’ philosophy, underlining how the author’s open-mindedness and curiosity towards other cultures makes him particularly relevant to the 1880s.224 However, in the last

222 The cosmopolitanism I write about here is clearly not related to the ‘vernacular cosmopolitism’ Homi Bhabha tries to emphasise (Bhabha, 1996, pp. 191-207). Stéphane Sarkany notices in his study on Paul Morand’s cosmopolitanism that the cosmopolite writers of the ear tended to be ‘proponent of the elite being cosmopolitan and against the masses being so. (partisan[s] du cosmopolitisme des élites, et adversaire[s] de celui des masses)’ (Sarkany, 1968, p. 103). 223 ‘Le raffinement social dont Horace définira le caractère intellectuel comme “nil admirari” : discrète supériorité de l’homme qui a l’expérience du monde et que, contrairement au provincial naïf, rien ne saurait étonner’. 224 ‘To put oneself under the pressure of a new country, like a chemist puts his body under the pressure of a new temperature observing without any bias the little pleasures and the little pains that this newness brings... (Soumettre sa personne à la pression d’un pays nouveau, comme un chimiste soumet son corps à la pression d’une température nouvelle, en observant avec une entière absence de parti pris les petites jouissances et les petites souffrances que cette nouveauté emporte avec elle…)’ ‘It was necessary, in order for such a way of mind to become possible, first that traveling was easier, and also that the national prejudices were weaker. Today when both conditions are fulfilled, a relatively great number of people make themselves, like Beyle, [...] the centre of exotic sensations. Little by little and thanks to an unavoidable encounter between these many practitioners of cosmopolitan life, a European society is being built, an aristocracy of a particular order, whose complex mores have not yet been depicted. (Il a fallu, pour qu’une telle disposition d’esprit devînt possible, d’abord que les voyages fussent plus aisés, et aussi que la somme des préjugés nationaux fût plus faible. Aujourd’hui que l’une et l’autre condition se trouve remplie, un assez grand nombre de personnes se font, comme Beyle, […] des centres de sensations exotiques. Peu à peu et grâce à une rencontre inévitable de ces divers adeptes de la vie cosmopolite, une société européenne se constitue, aristocratie d’un ordre particulier dont les mœurs complexes n’ont pas eu leur peintre définitif.)’ (Bourget, 1885, p. 298 and p. 304).

129 pages of the essay, Bourget ventures the idea that cosmopolitanism is a cause of decadence.

The question whether this cosmopolitan spirit, which progress keeps increasing [...], is as profitable as it is dangerous, remains open. The moralist [...] has to acknowledge that nations lose much more than they gain by mingling with each other, and that races especially lose much more than they gain by leaving the place where they have grown up. In order for the human plant to grow strong, able to produce even stronger heirs, it is necessary that it absorbs [...] all the physical and moral sap of a single location. [...] Contemporary high society [...] has reached this hour, guilty maybe but certainly delicious, when dilettantism replaces action; [...] when ideas and mores are exchanged [...]. This is again one of the aspects of what may be called decadence.225

Bourget develops this idea further in his novels Cosmopolis (1893) and Némésis (1916).226 The publication dates are particularly relevant here. 1916 is the middle of the First World War, when in the bloodied battlefields of Europe little space was left for any kind of cosmopolitan ideal. Moreover, it is during the 1880s and 1890s that French political and intellectual milieus become deeply concerned by the question of the nation. From 1894 to 1900, the Dreyfus Affair 227 brought to the surface the hidden tensions about national identity that had been growing at least since France’s defeat by Prussia in 1871 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. These two decades saw the birth of multiple arguments that were to shape French

225 ‘C’est une question de savoir si cet esprit cosmopolite, dont le progrès va s’accélérant […], est aussi profitable qu’il est dangereux. Le moraliste [...] est obligé de reconnaître que les nations perdent beaucoup plus qu’elles ne gagnent à se mêler les unes aux autres et que les races surtout perdent beaucoup plus qu’elles ne gagnent à quitter le coin de terre où elles ont grandi. Pour que la plante humaine croisse solide, capable de porter des rejetons plus solides encore, il est nécessaire qu’elle absorbe en elle […] toute la sève physique et morale d’un endroit unique. […] La haute société contemporaine […] est parvenue à cette heure, coupable peut-être, à coup sûr délicieuse, où le dilettantisme remplace l’action ; […] heure d’échanges d’idées et d’échanges de mœurs. […] C’est encore ici une des formes de ce que l’on est convenu de nommer la décadence. Stendhal fut un des apôtres de cette forme et un des ouvriers de cette décadence’ (Bourget, 1885, pp. 305-308). 226 For a discussion in English on Cosmopolis in particular and Bourget’s views on cosmopolitism in general, see Richard Hibbit (2010, p. 173-187). Adeline Tintner presents Némésis, noticing how much darker its depiction of cosmopolitism is (‘moribund, destructive, and malformed’) (Tintner, 1991, p. 173). 227 Dreyfus is convicted in December 1894, but the violent controversies surrounding his innocence only start in 1897. Zola’s famous open letter ‘J’accuse...!’ is published in January 1898.

130 nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, from the moderate Ernest Renan’s and his speech at the Sorbonne Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882) to the more radical Maurice Barrès’, whose novel Les Déracinés (1897) introduces a different understanding of the nation than Renan’s and one closer to Bourget’s.228 The anti- Semitism that overtly became an important component of French nationalism with the Dreyfus Affair can thus be interpreted as anti-cosmopolitanism, as part of the reason why Jews were especially targeted was their perceived rootlessness. This narrow, albeit paradoxical, association between cosmopolitanism and reactionary thought persists in French literature after the First World War. In a 1922 interview, Paul Morand calls for the creation of a ‘new cosmopolitanism’. Morand presented it as surpassing exoticism, as exoticism was, according to him, ‘from the outside (ce qui est en dehors),’ while cosmopolitanism was about ‘establishing for ourselves and for others new relationships, exact and constant, between our country and the rest of the world (établir pour nous-mêmes et pour autrui des rapports nouveaux, exacts et constants entre notre pays et le reste de l’univers)’ (Sarkany, 1968, p. 84). The same year, Morand had published his first great success, Ouvert la nuit, which is a collection of six short stories taking place mostly around Europe, each exploring what are supposed to be national traits, often embodied by a woman the narrator meets during his travel: Catalonian Night, Turkish Night, Roman Night, Hungarian Night, The Night of the Six Days (La Nuit des six jours), and Nordic Night. This topic of erotically charged enjoyment of foreign lands, reminiscent of Pierre Loti (albeit in a much less ornate, modernist writing-style), does not actually seem very far from exoticism.229 Horiguchi Daigaku, Morand’s translator, thus cleverly remarks in an article published in Serupan (The Snake) in 1932: ‘Paul Morand [...] hates exoticism. But if exoticism were to be removed from his works, half of their interest would be lost. Men sometimes hate out of love’ (HDZ, vol. 7, p. 180).230

228 To summarise very bluntly, Renan has a contractual understanding of the nation; the existence of a nation is for him a ‘daily referendum (un plébiscite de tous les jours)’. On the other had, according to Barrès’ ethnic nationalism, ‘Individual is nothing; society is everything (L’individu n’est rien, la société est tout)’. For Renan’s speech in English, see Homi Bhabha (1990, pp. 8-22). Zeev Sternhell’s and Michel Winock’s analyses of Barrès’ nationalism are famous; for a discussion on the subject, see Brigitte Krulic (2007, pp. 3-13). 229 On Loti and gender in orientalism, see the following Chapter. 230 「ポオル・モオランは、[...] エキゾチズムを憎んでゐる。然し彼の作品からエキゾチズムを除いたら、その興趣の一半は失はれる。尤も人は、愛するが故に憎むことをしばしばする。」

131 Cosmopolitanism and exoticism thus exist in a perpetual tension. The attraction of the exotic comes from newness and unfamiliarity; it has to do with physically experiencing what George Steiner identifies, following Adorno, as the ‘unhousedness’ that, as underlined in the introduction of Part 2, plays such an important role within modern literature. Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, is all about feeling at home wherever one goes; but because of this very quality that sets him/her apart from the majority who strongly identify with national identities, the cosmopolitan is a traveller who enjoys different settings and distinctive cultural contexts. Hence, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when travelling was no longer physically challenging, and commercial and cultural exchanges were commonplace, the cosmopolitan aesthete feeling threatened by technical progress and democratisation; the more people move and mingle, the more countries lose their national characteristics, and the less aesthetically rewarding travelling becomes. Paul Morand is thus a key figure within this anti-modern cosmopolitan literature that, as Antoine Compagon identifies, starts in France with Chateaubriand 231 ; Morand articulates a theory of anti-modern elitism while embodying the many contradictions that mark the fascination with otherness within French literature. His first collection of short stories, Les Extravagants, which was written in 1910-1911 but only published posthumously in 1980s, was subtitled, echoing Henri Murger, Scènes de la vie de bohème cosmopolite. Vincent Giroud notices in the ‘Introduction’ how much this early work of Morand’s owes to Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis (Giroud, 1986, p. 12). On the one hand, Morand, a polyglot cosmopolite himself, deeply despises those who are unable to appreciate the beauty of foreign lands. Le Voyage (1927) is an ode to travelling and to broadening one’s mind; he writes in Chapter Five: ‘To praise one’s little piece of land, that is a dead man’s perspective (Faire l’éloge de son coin de terre : point de vue de cadavre)’ (Sarkany, 1968, p. 34). But in the name of the same motto, he laments the progress of cultural and ethnic hybridity, for instance in another travel story, Rien que la terre (1926): ‘The earth is no more this flag of violent colours: now is the dirty time of the Mixed-

231 See the Introduction.

132 race. (La terre cesse d’être un drapeau aux couleurs violentes : c’est l’âge sale du Métis.) (Morand, 2001a, pp. 15-16)’232 Morand, as a career diplomat, did not hesitate to side with the Vichy government during the Second World War, and this greatly contributed to the tarnishing of his reputation after 1945. In the 1960s, he defended his prejudice against the ‘mixed-race’ in the name of Aestheticism.

Do not forget that when I choose I subject or I deal with current events, it is from the artist’s point of view, that is to say from the viewpoint of a man who rejoices in contrasting colours, and who does not wish at all — as an ideology would do, for instance — to lessen them or make them disappear. Never depart from the aesthetical viewpoint when it comes to me. It explains the contradictions and everything else (Sarkany, 1968, p. 233).233

Indirectly justifying collaborating with the Vichy regime in the name of Aestheticism seems highly irrational, but this argument of ‘contrasting colours’ for beauty’s sake does rightly identify the highly paradoxical nature of French exoticism. Morand’s explicit cosmopolitan inspiration is indeed Arthur de Gobineau, and more specifically Gobineau’s Nouvelles asiatiques (1876) (Sarkany, 1968, p. 31). Indeed, in the “Introduction”, the nineteenth century French author claims to elaborate his racial theory based on an aesthetic curiosity towards foreigners.

It is because men are essentially different that their passions, their views, the way they themselves conceive others, their beliefs, interests, problems they deal with, that studying these presents such a varied and strong interest, and that it is important to study them [...] This is what gives

232 In another work, Hiver caraïbe (1929), Morand specifies: ‘I did not write “the time of the dirty mixed-race” but “the dirty time of the mixed-race”. Black is beautiful just like white is beautiful. Grey is ugly’ (Morand, 2001b, p. 133). 233 ‘Ne perdez pas de vue que, quand je prends un sujet ou que je traite une nouvelle, c’est d’un point de vue d’artiste, c’est-à-dire d’un homme qui se réjouit des contrastes de la couleur, et qui ne désire pas du tout — comme le ferait un idéologue par exemple — les amoindrir ou les effacer. Ne quittez jamais le point de vue esthétique en ce qui me concerne. Cela explique les contradictions et tout le reste’.

133 history its value, part of its merit to poetry, and is the whole point of the novel (Sarkany, 1968, p. 29).234

In Japan, Gobineau’s ideas expressed in Essai sur les inégalités des races humaines (1853-1855) were presented, with seemingly relatively little impact, in a conference given immediately before the Russo-Japanese War by Mori Ōgai, titled ‘Jinshu tetsugaku kōgai’ (Synopsis of Racial Philosophy, 1903) (Ryō, 2009, pp. 233- 248). Ōgai, who had read Gobineau in German, seemed to be mainly interested in Gobineau’s success in Germany (among personalities such as Richard Wagner), and took a relatively neutral stance towards Gobineau’s ideas while noticing the highly questionable methodology of the Frenchman’s ‘scientific’ claims (Ryō, 2009, p. 237). Twenty years later, Horiguchi’s translation of Ouvert la nuit (Yoru hiraku) was met with great enthusiasm in Japan, as shown by Chiba Kameo’s 1924 article ‘Shinkankakuha no tanjō’ (The Birth of Shinkankakuha), where the literary critic attributed the emergence of a new generation of writers — namely Kawabata Yasunari and Yokomitsu Riichi — around the journal Bungei jidai (Literary and Artistic Age) to Morand’s influence (see Azusa Omura, 2012). Morand translated by Horiguchi was seen as an anti-Naturalist who renewed the topos of the supremacy of the senses over reason —already central to Romanticism and Decadence, as we have seen — through his modernist style. His popularity also coincided with the violent and sudden modernisation of Tokyo forced on the city by the 1923 earthquake. In his many essays presenting the French author, Horiguchi analyses quite clearly the complex mix of cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and racism that can be found in his works. As a deeply cosmopolitan individual himself, born just like Morand in a highly mobile, multilingual, high-class family, Horiguchi’s deeply personal endorsement of Morand’s cosmopolitanism (sekai-shugi) appears clearly. In Myōjō in 1923, Horiguchi compares him to two key figures of French literary cosmopolitanism/exoticism, Stendhal and Loti (HDZ, vol. 7, p. 425). In 1926, he writes:

234 ‘C’est parce que les hommes sont essentiellement différents que leurs passions, leurs vues, leur façon d’envisager eux-mêmes les autres, les croyances, les intérêts, les problèmes dans lesquels ils ont engagés, c’est pour cela que leur étude présente un intérêt si varié et si vif, et qu’il est important de se livrer à cette étude […]. Cela donne à l’histoire sa valeur, à la poésie une partie de son mérite, au roman toute sa raison d’être’.

134 There was always some sort of criticism towards the society, or criticism towards civilisation, in Morand’s mind-set. Only, he does not seem to have any intention to actively play a leading role in society. Morand’s attitude is limited to making previously unaware people aware of what kind of contemporary society they live in. Yoru hiraku [Ouvert la nuit], Yoru tozasu [Fermé la nuit, 1923], Revisu to Ireen [Lewis et Irène, 1924], Koi no Yōroppa [L’Europe galante, 1925], all of these show this. [...] In Koi no Yōroppa for the first time, he reminisces with nostalgia about the pre-war society, as a very distant era that is forever gone. [...] People always look back to the past, compare it with the present, and think of the past as much superior. [...] In his latest opus, a prose poem called Tatta kono chikyū dake de wa [Rien que la terre] [...], he shares for the first time his predictions about the society to come, from a sociological or civilizational critique viewpoint. Judging from this, as a result from his travels in Asia, one can see that he has adopted the Yellow Peril discourse common among the Whites (HDZ, vol. 7, pp. 428-429).235

Horiguchi’s admiration for Morand’s treatment of exotic themes thus did not blind him to their reactionary and racist undertones, but this lucidity also meant that Horiguchi — whose younger half-sister and half-brother, having a Belgium mother, were ‘mixed-race’ — never condemned Morand’s literature, for instance in the name of a more progressive vision of racial and cultural hybridity. This somewhat distanced yet ambiguous attitude towards European Decadence’s racist undertones seems to be characteristic of Japanese Decadence. The most representative author who integrates race, and, more significantly to our reflection here, racial hybridity, as an aesthetic motif within his literature is arguably Tanizaki. In works contemporary of Morand’s fame in Japan, such as Nikukai (A

235 「はじめから、モオランの気持のなかには一種の社会批判とか文明批評とか云つたやうな気持はいつでもあつたのである。唯、積極的に社会を指導すると云ふ気持はなかつたらしい。モオランの態度は、いつも現在さう云ふ生活を続けながらそれを気付かずにゐる人々にそれを知らせてやると云ふだけであつた。『夜ひらく』『夜とざす』『レヰスとイレエン』『恋の欧羅巴』すべてさうである。[...]『恋の欧羅巴』に至つてはじめて、戦前の世間さへ、遠くかけ離れた、過ぎ去つた一時代として、なつかしい懐古の情でこれを思ひ返す [...]。人はいつでも過ぎ去つた昔を思ひ返して、これを現在とひき較べて、いつも昔の方がはるかに優れたもののやうに思ひなす。[...] 彼の最新作「たつたこの地球だけでは」[...] と云ふ散文詩で、はじめて将来の社会に対する社会学的な、文明批評的な予測を語つてゐる。これを見ると、彼の東洋旅行の結果、彼の白人種に通有する黄渦説を抱くに至つたのを識ることが出来る。」「ポオル・モオランの文章」

135 Lump of Flesh, 1923), Chijin no ai (Naomi, 1924), or Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1929), female characters’ racial ambiguity plays a crucial role in enhancing their power of attraction (LaMarre, 2005). As Deborah Shamoon writes about Tanizaki’s ‘racialized portrait’ of his female heroines, they are first and foremost ‘the product of a decadent and hybrid mass culture’ (Shamoon, 2012, p. 1089). The question of racial and cultural hybridity is therefore also affected by the antithetical tension at the core of Decadence between fascination and repulsion for Decadence itself. The Japanese Decadent writers thus occupy an ambiguous position. On the one hand, they consider themselves part of an aesthetic for which creating a distance with the native land and establishing a relationship to the foreign — be it through exoticism or cosmopolitanism — is central; on the other hand, they are cast by the French adherents of this aesthetic into the role of the foreign. In order to pursue further these reflections on the Decadent exile, it is essential to explore the French Decadent discourse of otherness and the relation of the Japanese towards it. The notions of Orientalism and Japonism thus need to be reexamined from a cross-cultural perspective.

136 CHAPTER FOUR The Decadent Discourse of Otherness

What a curious fact of literary history is the craze of our time for non- classical literatures. It is not that there is no interest in Greek, Latin and French literatures but it is mostly their pre-classical and post-classical periods that are studied. All interest lies in what is called the origins and the decadent eras (Calinescu, 1987, p, 164).

These lines written by Renan in the 1850s are identified by Matei Calinescu as the starting point for the awareness of the French fascination with non-classical civilisations. He further writes,

Renan is probably the first to have been aware of the remarkable fact that the fascination with decadence and the apparently contradictory fascination with origins and primitivism are actually two sides of one and the same phenomenon. The intimate relationship between the craze for the oversophisticated, excessively refined products of decadence, and the craze for the naïve, awkward, immature manifestations of “primitive” creativeness has been demonstrated over and over again by the development of modern literature and art since the late nineteenth century (Calinescu, 1987, p, 164).

The representation of non-European lands within Western art, summed up under the term Orientalism — which will be discussed below — is thus a vital feature of Decadence as it allows a reflection on pre-decadent and/or post-decadent state. In as much as decadence is the product of an excess of civilisation, barbarism is both the past and the future of the decadent West. As David Weir puts it,

When we recognize in the concept of decadence the primary meaning of decay we are immediately confronted with a metaphor of organicism: the state of culture decays, tends toward the state of nature represented by

137 barbarism. Decadence and barbarism, like decadence and progress, are fused into a relationship that is reciprocal rather than oppositional. (Weir, 1995, p. 12)

The focus on a fantasmatic Orient within decadent literature thus merges with dreams of rejuvenation in a constant tension between fascination and repulsion, such as in Leconte de Lisle’s Poèmes barbares (1862). The Decadent poet considers himself as the last tenant of classical civilisation who, as the product of an exhaustive, over-sophisticated state of culture, has no desire to stand against a despised but all powerful state of nature; an image summed up in Verlaine’s famous lines ‘I am the Empire at the end of decadence / Who watches the tall white Barbarians go by (Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence / Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs.’) (‘Langueur’, 1883). The reference here is the Roman Empire being invaded by Germanic tribes, but, as we shall see, the Orient at the end of the nineteenth century came to stand for the antithesis of modern civilisation rather than actual countries and cultures.

1. Objectifying Otherness: Japan and Orientalism

Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism leaves little room to understand the appeal it might have had for non-European writers. If Orientalism is merely ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said, 1978, p. 3), the only explanation for Kafū or Tanizaki taking on Orientalist conventions would be the desire to be part of the winners within the European colonial world order. This is indeed how Japanese Orientalism has usually been analysed by Japanese academia. Kan Sanjun for instance writes in Orientarizumu no Kanata (Beyond Orientalism, 2004) that since Meiji onwards, intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi ‘have worked towards assimilating their stance to the one of the “observer”=the West, [...] who contemplates the non-Western world and especially the Orient’ (Kan, 2004, p. 104).236 Without dismissing the fact that, by adopting the

236 「非西欧世界とくにオリエントを [...] 眺める「見る側」＝西欧に自らのスタンスを接近させようとする努力がうかがえる。」Kan adds that the privileged objects of this Western-style Japanese gaze are ‘Persia, Turkey, and China’, as ‘archetypes’ for ‘closed’ (mikai 未開) civilisations, as opposed to Japan’s Enlightened (literally ‘opened’) civilisation (kaika bunmei 開化文明) (Kan, 2004, p. 104). On Fukuzawa Yukichi and the intellectual debates in Japan concerning ‘civilisation’, see also Koyasu

138 same discourse, a Japanese like Kafū may have wished to be seen as part of the domineering West, I would argue that Orientalism should also be considered from an aesthetic perspective.237 A simple but fundamental question needs first to be addressed. Does not Japan itself qualify as the essentialised object within Orientalism? Is there no technical impossibility for a Japanese to be Orientalist? In other words, how can Japanese writers like Tanizaki and Kafū who, by all accounts, never turned a blind eye to the West’s ingrained racism toward everything non-European,238 position themselves on the side of the civilised looking down on the barbarian? As a non-European, non-White colonial empire equipped with all the paraphernalia of ‘the corporate institution’ (Said, 1978, p. 3) meant to subjugate its Asian neighbours — exercising control through ‘the language of truth, discipline, rationality, utilitarian value and knowledge’ (Said, 1978, p. 216) —, post-Meiji Japan presents a paradox, which in many ways hints at the limits of the subject/object dichotomy Said identifies as the foundation for Orientalism.239 When perceived as a mainly discursive phenomenon, Japan’s place within Orientalism is all the more problematic. If the Orient is indeed the object that ‘cannot represent itself and must be represented,’ as Said argues by appropriating Karl Marx’s sentence, what are we to do with Japonism — arguably a European fascination with the way the Japanese represented themselves — on the one hand, and with the quasi totality of Japanese literature — ceaselessly dealing with the questions of otherness and self- representation —, on the other? Are we to simply exclude Japan from the Orientalist paradigm altogether?240

Nobukuni (Koyasu, 2003, pp. 7-20). For further discussion on Japanese Orientalist discourse, see Oguma Eiji (2002). 237 The same observation about Orientalism’s shortcomings is eloquently made by Rachael Hutchinson: ‘Many of the problems of Orientalism stems from Said’s representation of the West and its discourse of Orientalism as a homogeneous, monolithic, ageless whole, a totalizing system. [...] Although Said’s denial of agency within a dominant discourse depends on a closed binary system, the existence of writers from the so-called Orient such as Nagai Kafū, who took the Orient as object for his own writing, demonstrates that such a closed system cannot be upheld’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 9). 238 ‘The issue of race and power is a major theme in Rinkan, and it is clear that Kafū had a high degree of critical awareness with regard to racial dynamics in America’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 100). 239 On this paradox, see Imazawa Noriko (Imazawa, 1993, pp. 390-395). 240 Said’s discourse on Japan has been notably scarce. On the subject of Said and Japan, see Daisuke Nishihara (Nishihara, 2005). Inaga Shigemi suggests that, within the field of visual art, Japonism is part of Orientalism but differs in the way it ‘has enjoyed positive acclaim as an innovative aspect of “Modern Art”’, while Orientalist paintings ‘were relegated to the category of “bad paintings” until they were recently rehabilitated by the post-modernist market.’ (Inaga, 1999, p. 3)

139 Japan, as part of a distant Far East, has never been geographically and culturally familiar enough to be essentialised early on as an antithesis of Europe, as the Islamic Orient has been.241 The Romantics, from Byron to Chateaubriand, thus tended to anchor their representation of otherness within the Islamic world (even though it would be a mistake to suggest that the Far East had never played a role within the European exotic imagination prior to the mid-nineteenth century).242 As a result, the Far East tended to occupy a somewhat indefinite position within the Romantics’ symbolic mapping of the world. Théophile Gautier’s remark on China in his 1838 novel Fortunio exemplifies this oscillation: ‘civilised when the whole world was barbaric, barbaric when the whole world is civilised. (Civilisée quand tout le monde était barbare, barbare quand tout le monde est civilisé)’ (Jourda, 1956, p. 106). From the 1860s onwards, Japan occupied such a central space within the European fascination with otherness that the phenomenon received a name: Japonism. Even though its relevance is especially strong within the field of visual arts, the revolution in representation it brought — contributing to changing the very way the French saw the world — was central, and accompanied by many theoretical texts. Inaga Shigemi indeed argues that Japonism not only displaced the geographical centre of Orientalism from the Islamic countries to Japan, it also eroded ‘the idea of faithful “documentation ([Jean-Léon] Gérôme)” of exotic scenes, based on the Western aesthetics of mimesis’ (Inaga, 1999, p. 3). It could thus be argued that Japonism participated in a global reaction against positivism that went beyond the field of visual arts.

241 Abdelkebir Khatibi proposes the following typology: the ‘barbarian’ associated with the Arabs and the Muslims, Africa associated with the ‘good savage’, and China and Japan with the ‘mysterious’ (Khatibi, 1987, pp. 38-52). Michaël Ferrier also notices the ‘French temptation to see in Japan a purely imaginative space’ (Ferrier, 2003, p. 34).

140 What differentiates Japonisme from Orientalism is the breakthrough in the limits of “representation.” While Orientalism mainly consisted of depicting the East according to Western aesthetic criteria and conventions, Japonisme implied the intrusion of the “grammar of the Other” into the Western cultural hegemony. The resultant deviation was three-fold: (1) an “eccentric” spatial rendering as a result of the destruction of linear perspective, (2) exaggerated coloration which negated chiaroscuro, and (3) expressive, spontaneous brush strokes (Inaga, 1999, p. 4).

Whether the ‘grammar of the Other’ is as susceptible to be integrated within texts — a system of linguistic signs — as it is within painting, with its entirely visual language, is another debate, but my point here is to argue that French literature underwent a similar crisis of representation that manifests itself within fin de siècle Orientalism. Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) is a case in point. Otherness is conveyed through a kaleidoscope of details — observations on colours, textures, sounds — that are left bare, without any authorial presence or commentary that would help the reader make sense of the unfamiliar setting and storyline. Thus, Salammbô signals a turning point within French Orientalism, as a ‘work [which] is constituted of basically romantic elements: the exotic, the unfamiliar, the “oriental”; the primitive, the ancient the aboriginal; the fantastic, the grotesque, the bizarre. But the technique is scrupulous, mean, detached, objective’ (Weir, 1995, p. 42). In the same way painting was abandoning linear perspective, literature was dispensing with a unifying focal point.

242 The eighteenth century had its own artistic and philosophical fascination for the East, which I will not investigate here. The East was then, as Pierre Jourda writes, ‘a fairyland (Les Mille et une nuits are translated in 1740 by Gallant), a land of pleasure (Favart’s Trois Sultanes, or [Diderot’s] Bijoux indiscrets), a land of wisdom, of tolerance, and virtue: to [Montesquieu’s] Lettres persanes succeeded [Voltaire’s] Zaïre, Mahomet, L’Orphelin de la Chine, Zadig. (Pays de la féerie (Les Mille et Une Nuits sont traduites en 1704 par Gallant), pays du plaisir (que l’on songe aux Trois Sultanes de Favart, ou aux Bijoux indiscrets), pays de la sagesse, de la tolérance et de la vertu : aux Lettres Persanes font suite Zaïre, Mahomet, L’Orphelin de la Chine, Zadig)’ (Jourda, 1956, p. 93). For the Romantics, the Orient does contain the Far East, as the 1829 Preface of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales shows: ‘Today, the Orient has become a concern of ours more than it has ever been. Never have Oriental studies been so advanced. [...] We have a scholar specialised in each idiom of the Orient, from China to Egypt. (On s’occupe aujourd’hui [...] beaucoup plus de l’Orient qu’on ne l’a jamais fait. Les études orientales n’ont jamais été poussées si avant. […] Nous avons aujourd’hui un savant cantonné dans chacun des idiomes de l’Orient, depuis la Chine jusqu’à l’Égypte.)’ However, China does not play any role within the poems themselves, which, reflecting the political preoccupations of the time, mainly deal with Greece and Turkey.

141 Flaubert’s use of the Orient as a purely aesthetical device may represent an extreme.243 But this usage of otherness as a provider of purely abstract aesthetic sensations can be identified within late nineteenth century Orientalism as a whole. The focalisation on artistic details without bothering with the human context is a constant in the depiction of foreign lands, from the Goncourt to Pierre Loti (Millward, 1955, p. 139), and Japan plays a key role within this de-humanisation of otherness.244 This objectification of otherness, or, in other words, the aetheticisation of the Orient has been celebrated when it comes to the Goncourt’s appreciation of Japanese art but, as we shall see below in more details, criticised in the case of Pierre Loti. The difference lies in the fact that the formers mainly deal with art pieces while the latter describes actual human beings, but both approaches remain fundamentally similar. As Ōkubo Takaki rightly notices, ‘What Loti says is that [...] Japan, for him as a European, does not exist within a real, human relationship, but only as an effect (effet)’ (Ōkubo, 2001, pp. 24-25).245 The Japanese of Kafū’s and Tanizaki’s generation were well aware of the special place their country occupied within the European artistic world and were, for the most part, enthusiastic about it. In 1913-1914, Kafū published a series of essays about ukiyo-e in Mita bungaku, ‘Taiseijin no mitaru Katsushika Hokusai’ (Katsushika Hokusai Seen by Europeans), ‘Gonkūru no Utamaro narabi Hokusai-den’ (Goncourt’s Writings on Utamaro and Hokusai), and ‘Ōbei no ukiyo-e kenkyū’ (Ukiyo-e Studies in the West), presenting in great details the views of key-figures of Japonism such as Edmond de Goncourt, Henri Cernuschi, and Félix Régamey. It has been remarked many times that the French Japonists’ focalisation on ukiyo-e betrayed a deep and, to

243 It is no coincidence that Flaubert chose Carthage, radically different because not only culturally but also chronologically remote, as his setting. But Carthage, as the antithesis of Rome, stands for everything European classical culture has rejected and despised: irrationality, mysticism, sensuality, violent outbursts of passion, etc. 244 David Weir rightly remarks that ‘decadence and barbarism fuse in he notion of dehumanization’ (Weir, 1995, p. 13). 245 「ここでロチがいわんとしているのは、[...] その日本というものが、結局、ヨーロッパ人である自分には、現実的、人間的関係とは異質な作用、効果（effet）としてしか存在しないということである。」Ōkubo is quoting the word used by Loti in the dedication of Madame Chrysanthème to the Duchess of Richelieu: ‘Even though it seems that the longest role belongs to Madame Chrysanthème, it is certain that the three main characters are Me, Japan, and the Effect this country produced on me. (Bien que le rôle le plus long soit en apparence à Madame Chrysanthème, il est bien certain que les trois principaux personnages sont Moi, le Japon et l’Effet que ce pays m’a produit)’ (Loti, 1888, no page number).

142 some degree, deliberate ignorance of the canons of Japanese art.246 Nevertheless, the Japanese Decadents willingly embraced this objectification of their own country specifically because of its aestheticising quality. Kinoshita Mokutarō thus writes:

[At the Circle of Pan,] we loved ukiyo-e, music and theatre from the Tokugawa period, not out of traditionalism, archaism, nor nationalism, but out of exoticism. If anything, it is through Goncourt, Julius Kurt, Monet or Degas, that we first really understood ukiyo-e. (Noda, 1976, p. 16)247

If Japonism thus contributed to the reverse exoticism phenomenon we have touched on above, the specific treatment of the Orient — including Japan — within French literature at the end of the nineteenth century exercised an enduring fascination on the Japanese decadent writers, and especially Nagai Kafū. Kafū and, under his influence, Tanizaki — as highlighted by Nishihara (Nishihara, 2003, pp. 80-89) —, are arguably the two most famous Japanese writers whose works, mainly those published during the 1910s, show a strong awareness of French Orientalist literature. The question has been thoroughly analysed by several scholars, in English and Japanese, so I will not go into great details and will leave aside the vast and complex issue of the relationships between the Japanese writers of the era and China. 248 My point here is mainly to understand the function of the objectified Orient within the works of a writer such as Kafū: how does he position himself within the civilised/barbaric dynamic of French Orientalism, and why is Orientalism appealing to him? Hutchinson analyses how, especially in Amerika monogatari and the stories of Kaerimichi, the section of Furansu monogatari that deals with his journey home through the Middle East, ‘Kafū is taking on the conventions of French and British

246 ‘The Anglo-Saxon [Japanese connoisseurs] of the day, like William Anderson and Ernest Fenollosa, highly appreciated Japanese “Quattrocento” Zen-buddhist paintings. While they sarcastically laughed at the French high estimation of “vulgar” ukiyo-e prints, the French critics were proud of their initiative. They claimed that it was the French art critics who had discovered Hokusai and taught his importance to the Japanese’ (Inaga, 1999, p. 4). 247 「[パンの会では]浮世絵とか、徳川時代の音曲、演劇といふものが愛されたが、それはこの場合、伝承主義でも古典主義でもなく、国民主義でもなく、エキゾチズムの一分子であった。浮世絵は寧ろゴンクウルやユウリウス・クルトやモネやドガなどを通じて始めて味解せられた。」

143 orientalist discourse for his own works’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 116). His object is ‘The Orient [...] in references to Turkey, Persia, and Arabia, when Kafū is describing outlandish beauty, unnatural quiet, or the sorrowful qualities of music’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 96). While ‘taking on’ these conventions, ‘Kafū [...] associate[s] himself [...] clearly with France and the French writers, and reproduce[s] the rhetorical strategies of Orientalist discourse’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 112). In other words, when observing the Islamic Orient through French literary conventions, Kafū firmly and unambiguously establishes himself on the side of civilisation.249 This is especially striking in the often-mentioned short story Suibijin (The Intoxicated Beauty), from Amerika monogatari (Seidensticker, 1965, p. 22; Ken Ito, 1991, p. 38; Hutchinson, 2012, pp. 96-98). It presents an archetypical story of a French man whose fascination and lust for a sexually manipulative black woman drives him to his ruin. Opposing masculine intellectuality to feminine animality — and its corollaries: sensuality, irrationality, stupidity, danger... —, stereotypically functions as a parallel to the civilised Occident/barbaric Orient dynamic, the one strengthening the other. 250 As Ito and Hutchison have noticed, the topos of the dangerous/seductive black woman has a lot to do with Baudelaire; by the time Kafū was writing, Baudelaire’s Haitian mistress Jeanne Duval had indeed gone down in decadent mythology as the brainless but irresistible ‘black Venus’ who threatens to

248 For a very complete analysis of Kafū’s Orientalism, see Chapter 3 of Rachael Hutchinson’s book, ‘Positioning the Observer. Kafū’s “Orient” and Orientalism’ (Hutchinson, 2012, pp. 95-132). The following section is partly indebted to her. On Tanizaki’s orientalism in English, see Ken Ito (Ito, 1991). On Japanese writers and China, one may see Nishihara Daisuke (Nishihara, 2003), Inoue Satoshi (2006), and Qiu Yafeng (2010). 249 So does Tanizaki in his writings on China and India, as noticed by multiple scholars. See Yamamoto Saburō (1990, p. 142); Chiba Shunji (1998, pp. 309-319); Nishihara Daisuke (2003, pp. 104-143). This self-representation on the side of civilization does not hinder a very complex approach to race, as underlined by Adrian Pinnington, who analyses ‘the complication introduced into Tanizaki’s reception of [...] European orientalism [...] by his consciousness of Japanese racial difference from the West, and [how] this consciousness led him to relativise orientalist paradigms in interesting ways’ (Pinnington, 2007, p. 76). 250 On Orientalism, objectification, and gender, see the last part of this Chapter. Essentialisation of woman by reducing her to her physicality is widespread within Decadence. Baudelaire writes for instance, in Mon cœur mis à nu: ‘The woman does not know how to separate the soul from the body. She is simplistic, just like animals. (La femme ne sait pas séparer l’âme du corps. Elle est simpliste, comme les animaux)’ (Baudelaire, 1962, p. 256). On the subject, see Elaine Showalter, who writes that women represent the ‘inhabitants of a mysterious and frightening wild zone outside of patriarchal culture’ (Showalter, 1990, p. 8); see also the remarkable study by Mireille Dottin-Orsini (1993).

144 devour every white man attracted by the sirens of exoticism. 251 Kafū’s narrator comments that the woman has ‘more animal blood in her than human,’ and adds: ‘Her eyes are different than ours, men of civilisation. They are the eyes of animals. The eyes of the tamed cattle when they beg their master for food’ (KZ, vol. 4, p. 55).252 Division between the civilised ‘us’ and the barbaric ‘them’ is irrevocably established here. It thus seems undeniable that, as Hutchison writes, ‘The Orient envisioned by Kafū in Amerika monogatari reflects the sexual, uncivilized, non-modern aspects of the Orient used by Flaubert and the Decadent School’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 101). However, what seems especially important to me is that it does so in a very explicitly artistic gesture. The literary credentials of this essentialised Orient are everywhere flaunted. In Rokugatsu no yoru no yume (Dream on a June Night), the narrator declares himself ‘struck by a kind of strong sense of mystery and rapture — the kind which might wander under the skies of “the Orient”, which poets of the so- called Decadent School sing as the land of dreams’ (KZ, vol. 4, p. 266).253 Pierre Loti is quoted in the first page of Sabaku (Desert) as Kafū’s source of inspiration for his longing for Islamic countries:

Under the skies of distant America, I had often dreamt about this place. And when I lived in Japan, too, when I was reading the beautiful stories of Turkey by Pierre Loti long ago, I was then unable to feel any particular impression of Egypt, or Turkey, or Persia — that is to say, in short, that the stories were only beautiful fiction (KZ, vol. 4, p. 288).254

251 In La Chevelure, Jeanne’s hair is the ‘black ocean (noir océan)’ where ‘languorous Asia and burning Africa (La langoureuse Asie et la brulante Afrique)’ dwell. On the subject, see, among others, Pierre Emmanuel (1982). Mario Praz famously opens his classical book The Romantic Agony with a reflection on the fin de siècle femme fatale, inspired by Jeanne Duval, who was, according to him, irresistibly pretty but also (and even more so because of it) ‘stupid in everybody’s opinion including Baudelaire’s’ (Galik, 2005, p. 8). 252 「人間よりは動物の血を沢山に持って居る」;「あの目付はどうも我々文明の人間の目付ではない。動物の目付だ。馴れた家畜が主人に食物を請求る時の目付である。」 253 「所謂、デカダンス派の詩人の歌う夢の郷、『東の国』の空の下にでも彷徨う様な、一種の強い神秘と恍惚に打れる。」Rachael Hutchinson’s translation (2012, p. 57). She adds: ‘The link with France is emphasized by Kafū’s choice of script in which to present the word “Orient”, written in quotation marks as “Higashi no kuni,” “Land of the East,” but with katakana superscript pronouncing the word “orian,” marking it as a French word’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 101). 254 「自分は遠いアメリカの空の下で、幾度か思ひを此処に走せた当時の事を追想せずには居られぬ。日本に居た昔も、自分はロツチが美しいトルコの恋物語を読みながら、エジプトやトルコに対しては、此と云ふ特別な感想を持つ事が出来なかった—物語は要するに美しい架空の物語に過ぎなかった[...]。」 Translated by Hutchison (2012, p. 110). On Pierre Loti, see below.

145 Sabaku is especially clear when it comes to identifying and naming the author’s Orientalist references. It ends with a quotation in French, followed between parentheses by Kafū’s translation:

Turkey. Turkey of polygamy. Turkey of autocracy. Mystical Turkey. Ferocious Turkey. Turkey of great satire and indefinitely mysterious language. I suddenly recalled three lines of verse that Musset sings in his collection of poetry:

C’est le point capital du mahométanisme. De mettre le bonheur dans la stupidité. Que n’en est-il ainsi dans le christianisme ?

(The fundamental idea of Islam is finding happiness in ignorance. Why is this not so for Christianity?) (KZ, vol. 4, pp. 295-296)255

Hutchinson sees in the second half of this passage how ‘Islam becomes something that Kafū can look down on as inferior, childlike, and simple. Kafū’s Orient has taken on the idea underlying much of later Orientalist discourse, that of the Orient’s innocent, backward, nonrational character, and with this idea, its condescending attitude’ (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 115). What seems especially striking, though, is the first part that Hutchinson does not quote, a collection of adjectives and nouns tossed at the term ‘Turkey’ in no discernable order. The muddled accumulation in itself provokes a slightly comical effect, implicitly expressed in Nishihara Daisuke’s analysis of the same extract: ‘This Japanese writer, despite having never been to Turkey, starts to narrate Turkey with eloquence at the mere sight of a piece of fabric glimpsed from the top of his steamship!’ (Nishihara, 2003, p. 97).256 The supreme irony here is indeed that Kafū’s narrator is not traveling to Turkey but merely looking at a Turkish flag when sailing through the Suez Canal.

255 「土耳古。一夫多妻の土耳古。専制の土耳古。神秘なる土耳古。獰猛なる土耳古。偉大なる諷刺と無辺なる謎語の土耳古。自分はミュッセが詩篇の中に歌っている、[...]（回教の本旨は檮味を以て至福とす基督の教何ぞかくの如くならざるや）という三行の句をふと想起しつつ [...]」Hutchinson’s translation from ‘I suddenly...’ (2012, p. 115). 256 「この日本人作家は、トルコを訪れたことがないにもかかわらず、汽船の上から布切れ一枚見ただけで、雄弁にトルコを語り始める。」

146 Even though Nishihara only underlines this point to denounce the author’s Orientalism (in a strictly Saidian definition of the term), it seems to me that the irony of accumulating second-hand clichés (polygamy, autocracy, mysticism, ferocity) on top of a symbol (the Turkish flag) is not lost in Kafū’s text. Especially when the ‘unlimitedly mysterious language’ of Turkey is mentioned, one cannot but wonder if Kafū, a Japanese writer who just sojourned in countries where his language was virtually unknown, is not hinting toward a reflection on linguistic and cultural alterity. What is certain is that there is no clear clue suggesting the narrator subscribes to the idea of Islam as ‘ignorant’. The reader rather gets the feeling that the narrator is utterly indifferent to the reality of Islam. What he is actually writing about is not Turkey as a country, with its specific religion, language and mores, but as a signifier. He seems above all interested in the layer after layer of symbols that can be summoned by the sight of yet another symbol (the Turkish flag). Said writes that in Orientalism, ‘Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and disseminated anonymously, they are repeated without attribution’ (Said, 1978, p. 116). It seems that Kafū is practicing the exact same dissociation between ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ but not at all silently nor anonymously. He instead keeps quoting the texts that have ‘passed on’ to him ‘ideas’ about Islamic Orient. Are we to understand this focus on the Orientalisation of the Orient, rather than on the Orient itself, as a way to distance himself from the French objectification of Muslim countries, or on the contrary as an homage to the literary power of aestheticisation? I would choose the latter hypothesis. It seems to me that Kafū knowingly embraces the objectification of the foreign by the French Orientalist discourse specifically because it negates reality’s claim to weigh on literary (re)creation. In the same way, in the short story Suibijin mentioned above, convoking Orientalist imagery transforms into a mystical animal from far-away lands a woman whose prosaic nature — a local vaudeville dancer — is well known to the narrator. Orientalism is summoned in a deliberate effort to aestheticise the real.257

257 Tanizaki’s orientalism as analysed by Adrian Pinnington would thus be taking a similar approach of voluntary disjunction between reality and representation (on Tanizaki as a disciple of Kafū, see Chapter 1): ‘Tanizaki’s point is not that the clichés of orientalism are true, but rather that the desire expressed in orientalist fantasies [...] is deeply attractive to him. [...] For Tanizaki, [....] fantasies, including the fantasies of “race”, Westernisation and orientalism, were clearly fantasies and as such were neither to be suppressed by the state nor confused with reality’ (Pinnington, 2007, pp. 86-89).

147 In the deliberate artistic recreation of otherness, one may argue that Kafū specifically learnt from Japonism’s approach to the Orient. As Oscar Wilde famously wrote in 1889,

The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing extraordinary or curious about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. [...] The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists (Wilde, 2007, p. 324).

No one knew this better than Kafū, who was both familiar with the discourse of Japonism — as we have seen above — and utterly bored by the Japanese society he actually experienced. He thus writes in Kichōsha no nikki:

We long for the West. Westerners have decided that Japan is a land of dreams where beauty is superior to any other country. Humans are animated by the natural impulse to love what is the most distant to them (KZ, vol. 6, p. 189).258

Within Orientalism, Japonism indeed presents this interesting tendency of voluntarily wanting to expunge from its image of Japan all the modern traits that would effectively underline the growing similarities between Meiji Japan and Europe. What was seen as justifying the inferiority of the Orient compared to Europe — its religiosity, its lack of industrialisation, its autocratic regimes, in other words, its general backwardness — is displaced within Japonism as the very reason justifying European praise of Japan. This oscillation between repulsion and admiration was always latent within Orientalism prior to Japonism, but the celebration of otherness for otherness’ sake becomes explicit towards the end of the century. It is linked to the art for art’s sake mentality in as much as both pose aesthetics as a superior criterion to ethics. The point in fin de siècle’s Orientalism is not so much to condemn the

258 「我々は西洋にあこがれる。西洋人は日本をば此の上もない美しい夢の国だと独断して居る。人間は自分より遠かつたものを愛する自然の性情の至す処であらう[...]。」

148 Orient for not being civilised enough but to relish in its aesthetically stimulating alterity. As a result, Japonism’s ‘ideal Japan’ is untouched by Westernisation. As Pamela Warner underlines, the influential essays of Edmond de Goncourt on Japanese art encourage a perception of Japan as sharing essential traits with France:

While the common view of Japan was one of exoticism and difference, [...] Edmond de Goncourt stood out among commentators on Japan for repeatedly asserting formal and social similarities between its culture and that of France. Japan struck him not only by its difference, but also by its sameness. [...] By focusing on shared subjects and formal qualities in Japanese and French art, Goncourt ‘Frenchified’ Japanese artists and their work (Warner, 2009, online article).259

However, it is a clear mistake to see within this ‘Frenchification’ of Japanese art as encouraging Japan’s efforts to join the ranks of modern powers, and its victory over Russia would, as we shall see, effectively damage the idealised image Japan enjoyed at the end of the century. In this regard, the following quote from a letter of Van Gogh, a fervent enthusiast of Japanese woodblock prints as we know, is revelatory: ‘The Japanese draw quickly, very quickly, like a lightning flash, because their nerves are finer, their feelings simpler’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 3).260 Van Gogh uses a typically fin de siècle wording when he attributes the Japanese’s artistic sensitivity to their ‘fine nerves’.261 A mixture of refinement and simplicity thus explains the superior beauty of the Japanese drawings: the Japanese have a higher sensitivity to beauty because modernity has not numbed their feelings. Edmond de Goncourt’s praise of Japan came from a similar, notoriously anti-modern conception of art:

259 On the ‘Frenchification’ of Japanese art, see also Ting Chang (2006, pp. 65-78). 260 On Van Gogh and Japonisme, see for instance Inaga (1999, pp. 193-244).

149 He located a pure expression of Japanese art in the eighteenth century between an earlier period of Chinese influence on Japan and the later modernization undertaken with the advent of the Meiji empire. That this period coincided with his sense of French art reaching its purest expression in the eighteenth century only played into his nostalgia for a lost era of French essences, destroyed by the Revolution and the crass taste of the bourgeois governments that replaced the ancien régime (Warner, 2009, online article).262

Would it be that part of the fascination for Japan came from the perception that the country managed to be civilised without being affected by the ills of modernity?263 The Japonists do not in any way deny that Japan is civilised, but claim that it is so thanks to its pre-modern state. The reason why the idea of Japan was to play a key-role within Decadence appears here clearly: it helped to differentiate civilisation from progress, and thus to identify modernity as the enemy. The most dedicated admirers of Japan would thus emphasise again and again the country’s pre-modern qualities. The accounts that Émile Guimet and Félix Régamey gave of their 1876-1877 journey constantly make use of classical imagery in order to praise the country’s qualities:

261 Millmard notices the recurring motif of the over-stimulated nerves within decadent literature, especially through the use of the French expression vivre sur les nerfs, ‘to live on one’s nerves’: ‘“We live on our nerves without acknowledging that our reserve is getting exhausted”, says Barrès about his generation. Claude Larcher, hero of Paul Bourget’s Mensonges, also “lived only on his nerves.” (« Nous vivons sur nos nerfs sans reconnaître que nos réserves s’épuisent », dit Barrès de sa génération. Claude Larcher, héros de Mensonges, de Paul Bourget, lui aussi « vivant uniquement sur ses nerfs »)’ (Millmard, 1955, p. 24). The Decadent is the one who, among a society whose sensitivity has been numbed, is over-sensitive, as it is the only way to be sensitive within an over-stimulated, exhausted civilisation. 262 See also Debora Silverman: ‘To them [the Goncourt] the French Revolution was the first enemy, nineteenth-century democratic individualism the second. [...] Scorning the lower classes as vile animals and the bourgeois as vulgar philistines, they dedicated their lives to reconstituting the aristocratic art, manners, customs and objects of the era of Louis XV’ (Silverman, 1989, pp. 17-19). 263 Elisa Evett thus sees Japonisme as a precursor of primitivism within Western art’s never ending quest for pre-modern authenticity (Evett, 1982, pp. 96-114). On the question of modernity and on Baudelaire as an anti-modern, see the Introduction. Antoine Compagnon’s distinction between ‘anti- modern’ and ‘traditionalist’ makes superficial Christopher Reed’s argument that Japonists need to be separated into two groups, the nostalgic for ‘old-fashioned French absolutism’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 34) such as the Goncourt, who he mistakenly associates with traditionalism or academism, and the ‘champion[s] of republican democracy’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 35) such as Régamey or Cernuschi; if, as he rightly writes, ‘Japonisme [...] was at least as associated with the political and aesthetic avant-garde as with nostalgia for the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 37), it is specifically because the avant-garde as a whole tended to be anti-modern, regardless of its political affiliation.

150 But what is this classical vision that has appeared on deck? A group of young Romans advances, with dignity [...]. Everything recalls the solemn beauty of classical sculptures... (C. Reed, 2010, pp. 154-155)

I write to you from the land of dreams. [...] It is a perpetual enchantment - — the naked in all its glory — the costume as beautiful as the Antique, with variety in colours and shapes added. The magnificent landscape, everything. [...] The Golden Age; no more, nor less (Macouin and Omoto, 1990, p. 59).264

Japan thus came to be assimilated within Japonism to the harmonious symbiosis of the ‘eternal and immutable’ within the ‘contingency’ of the present, the two complementary faces of beauty that, according to Baudelaire in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, have been catastrophically dissociated in modernity. 265 Régamey’s wording is here too revelatory of his cultural references. When he mentions ‘the naked in all its glory’, Baudelaire’s 1857 poem immediately comes to mind:

I love the memory of these naked epochs, Whose statues Phoebus liked to tinge with gold. [...] The Poet today, when he wishes to imagine These primitive grandeurs, in places where one can see The nakedness of men and women, Feels a gloomy cold enveloping his soul [...] (Baudelaire, 1961, pp. 13- 14).266

264 ‘Mais quelle est cette vision antique qui apparaît sur le pont du bateau ? Un groupe de jeune Romains s’avance avec dignité [...] Tout rappelle les beautés graves de l’antique sculpture…’ Guimet, Promenades Japonaises. Reed’s translation (C. Reed, 2010, pp. 144-145). ‘Je t’écris du pays des rêves. [...] C’est un enchantement perpétuel — le nu dans toute sa splendeur — le costume aussi beau que l’antique avec la variété de coupe et de couleurs en plus. Un paysage merveilleux, enfin tout. [...] L’âge d’or, ni plus ni moins.’ Régamey, letter of 6 November 1876. 265 See Chapter 1. Praising the Orient for having kept the qualities of Classical times does not exclusively apply to Japan and the trend can be identified as dating back from Delacroix’s account of North Africa. See Inaga (1999, pp. 36-38). 266 ‘J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues, / Dont Phoebus se plaisait à dorer les statues. [...] / Le Poète aujourd’hui, quand il veut concevoir / Ces natives grandeurs, aux lieux où se font voir / La nudité de l’homme et celle de la femme, / Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme [...].’

151 It is thus Japonism’s great paradox that it loved in Japan what the Meiji State was trying to outgrow. In this respect, Pierre Loti’s accounts are especially interesting in the way they do not gloss over what Loti, as a typical fin de siècle Frenchman, considers ridiculous: Japan’s attempt to modernise. The harsh criticism of Japan which he is remembered for may in fact come from an excess of Japonist tendencies rather than, as it is often argued, a lack of Japanophilia.

2. Anti-modern Japonism: Through the Lens of Pierre Loti

There is an irony in the fact that Loti, now that his name is half forgotten and most of his works are out of print, maintains a place within the history of literature mainly through the influence of Postcolonial studies. He has become the French equivalent of Kipling, entirely reduced to the distasteful archetype of the colonial writer: racist, close-minded, misogynistic, full of insincere sentimentality, and self- righteously exploiting the weak for his own sexual satisfaction.267 My point in the following section is not to denounce these criticisms as unfair nor to try and rehabilitate Loti’s memory. I argue, however, that, within the complex exchanges of gazes that characterize the relationship between fin de siècle France and Japan, Loti’s significance is more multi-layered than today’s focus on his — otherwise undeniable — racism leads to suppose. Indeed, reflecting on the fact that Loti’s writings on Japan were read and oftentimes appreciated in Japan is a way to challenge the general explanation of the Japanese practice of Orientalism as a tool for pre-War Japan to negate its own belonging to the Orient, and thus automatically join the ranks of the West.268 More fundamentally, Kafū’s reception of Loti sheds light on the way Orientalist discourse helped to articulate the key-notions of modernity and beauty as being antithetical within a decadent worldview.

267 For a summary of the negative as well as more nuanced interpretations of Loti among contemporary academics, see Reed (C. Reed, 2010, pp. 10-12). 268 Loti wrote three texts about his journeys to Japan: Madame Chrysanthème (1887), Japoneries d’Automne (1889), and La Troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905). Despite not analysing Kafū’s reception of Loti in detail, Rachael Hutchinson also suggests that taking into account ‘Kafū’s clear admiration for Pierre Loti, whose Orient provided perhaps the most influential and long-lasting template for “exotic Japan” in Western culture’ helps to ‘draw out the complexities’ of orientalism (Hutchinson, 2012, p. 8).

152 Today, the Japanese reception of Loti’s three texts on Japan mainly focuses, as does the Western, on the author’s racist bias. The famous critic Itō Sei writes in 1969: ‘When reading [Loti] today, we feel a very unpleasant sensation, as if having a painful itch on the back’ (Itō S., 1969, p. 404).269 An introduction to Loti published in 1992 understandably warns the reader: ‘[his writings] will not necessarily arouse a pleasant after reading experience for the Japanese’ (Ochiai, 1992, p. 2); in a more recent study, the French literature specialist Terada Mitsunori explains: ‘His depiction of the Japanese is thoroughly critical, and since the very first encounters with merchants or geishas he unmercifully calls them “monkeys” or “small mice,” quite often offending our sensitivity’ (Terada, 2006, pp. 4-5).270 Even when Orientalism was still in fashion Pierre Loti did not escape negative judgments on his objectification of the Japanese, despite the author being a critical and economical success during his lifetime. Félix Régamey’s rewriting of Madame Chrysanthème from the viewpoint of Chrysanthème herself — in an inversion of perspectives that is strikingly similar to Akutagawa’s own response to the French writer271 — was immediately understood by his contemporaries as a direct criticism of Loti’s condescension towards the ‘natives’. Indeed a 1894 review in Le Figaro, the same newspaper that had first serialized Madame Chrysanthème in 1887, states: ‘In his pretty little book, Mr. Félix Régamey, the well-known artist, has endeavoured to avenge Japan for the adjectives that Pierre Loti has inflicted on it’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 3).272 Such adversity coming specifically from a fervent Japonist like Régamey may say more about the ambiguities of Japonism itself than about Loti’s writings per se. Indeed, Régamey and Loti share the same fundamental approach to Japan: the strangeness of their radical other comes from not a lack of but an excess of sophistication — this making it fundamentally different to the Islamic other. The only point where Régamey and Loti really differ from each other is in the judgment they hold upon this strangeness: the former revels in it while the second oscillates between

269 「今日それを読むと我々は最中がむずがゆくなるやうな不快感を抱く。」 270「日本人にとっては必ずしもこころよい読後感をもたらすものではない。」; 「日本人に対する描写の仕方はおしなべて批判的で、最初の物売りや芸者たちとの出会いから容赦なく「猿」や「小鼠」という形容を浴びせて、我我の神経を逆撫ですることが多い。」 271 See below for Akutagawa’s view on Japoneries d’automne. Madame Chrysanthème’s rewritings by Long and Puccini can equally be seen as a criticism of Loti; see Ogawa Sakue (2007). 272 Translation by C. Reed. For other negative reactions to Madame Chrysanthème upon its publication, see C. Reed (2010, pp. 16-17).

153 curiosity and repulsion. In this sense, Japonism really is an Orientalism suited for Decadence, unapologetically objectifying the world in the name of beauty. Loti’s perception of Japan seems always torn between admiration for the Japanese’ civility and artistry and the necessity to always remind himself of the utter alterity it represents.

Appeasement, peace, this is above all one feels the longer one sojourns in this place and the more one climbs [the hills of Nagasaki’s cemetery]; but for us it is very strange, the peace that this city of the dead exhales with the sent of its cedars and the smoke of its incense sticks: the peace of these thousands of dead souls who looked at the world and life through tiny oblique eyes and whose dream was so different than ours (Loti, 1936, p. 46).273

Loti’s racism thus appears clearly not only in the way he separates ‘them’ from ‘us’ but also in the physical determination of this difference. The image of the Japanese eyes seeing the world in a fundamentally different way because of their very shape is especially striking in the way it makes cultural difference irrevocably embedded within the flesh. It is probably these kinds of self-righteous colonial racism that made André Breton and his friends (among them the future fascist Drieu La Rochelle) condemn Loti as an ‘idiot’, along with Anatole France and Maurice Barrès, in the provocative Surrealist pamphlet of 1924, ‘Un cadavre’.274 Even though Régamey’s attempt to ‘avenge’ Chrysanthème was met with very little acclaim, it is indeed indubitable that the praise Loti abundantly received during his lifetime quickly faded into contempt, including in his own country. In a 1948 issue of the magazine La Gazette des lettres that looked back on the literature of the

273 ‘L’apaisement, la paix, c’est surtout ce que l’on sent pénétrer en soi, plus on séjourne dans ce lieu et plus on monte ; mais pour nous elle est très étrange, la paix que cette ville des morts exhale avec la senteur de ses cèdres et la fumée de ses baguettes d’encens : paix de ces milliers d’âmes défuntes qui perçurent le monde et la vie à travers de tout petits yeux obliques et dont le rêve fut si différent du nôtre’. 274 Written mainly to satirise Anatole France upon his death, it also attacks Barrès and Loti who had died the same year. The three are bundled together despite their very different political affiliations (France on the left, Loti on the right, and Barrès on the far right) as representatives of a defunct world order: ‘Loti, Barrès, France, let us mark with a beautiful white sign the year that put down these three sinister fellows: the idiot, the traitor, and the policeman. (Loti, Barrès, France, marquons tout de même d’un beau signe blanc l’année qui coucha ces trois sinistres bonshommes : l’idiot, le traître et le policier)’. http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100143070 (30/5/2017).

154 previous generation, no word seemed harsh enough to qualify Loti’s legacy. Gaëtan Picon, art critic and future director of the influential magazine Mercure de France, wrote: ‘I doubt that Loti has any value whatsoever’, while for the literary critic and dramatist Thierry Maulnier, Loti was merely associated with the ‘Oriental bazaar and sentimental rubbish’ (Ekström, 1953, p. 17). 275 These comments illustrate how Orientalist Decadence went out of fashion long before the rise of Postcolonial critique as much as they underline Loti’s declining reputation. Loti’s reception in Japan seems to have followed a somewhat similar path. The first Japanese translation of Madame Chrysanthème, by Nogami Toyoichirō, appeared in 1923, along with major works such as Hugo’s Les Misérables (trans. Toyoshima Yoshio), Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (trans. Sasaki Takamaru), and Maupassant’s Une Vie (trans. Hirotsu Kazuo), within a collection dedicated to French literature edited by Shinchōsha (Satō T., 1988, pp. 7-8). But, as Kafū’s homage to the author in Sabaku mentioned above shows, Loti was read within Japanese literary circles before this prestigious first translation. In this regard, it is significant that among the four well-known translators, critics and writers quoted above, Nogami Toyoichirō is the only specialist of English literature. Loti was indeed translated into English early on by Lafcadio Hearn, and Hearn’s influence in Japan must have had some impact on Loti’s reception there. 276 According to his own testimony, Kafū himself first knew Loti through translation: ‘I read Madame Chrysanthème in its English translation, and a very long time ago [...]’, he writes in 1911 (KZ, vol. 9, p. 131).277 Hearn translated Loti mainly before he established himself in Japan: from 1880 to 1887, he published ‘over twenty translations from Loti for two New Orleans papers and wrote at least four lengthy editorials about him, the first articles on Loti in English’; a collection of Loti’s articles on China translated by Hearn appeared under the title Impressions with an introduction by Henry James, another Loti enthusiast

275 ‘Je doute que Loti ait une valeur quelconque’; ‘bazar oriental et pacotille sentimentale’. 276 Loti was also presented at some length in October 1911 in the widely read literary magazine Bunshō sekai (World of Texts), and described as a major contemporary writer. See Odagiri Susumu (1990, p. 256). See below for Kafū reading Loti in English. For Lafcadio Hearn’s involvement with the Japanese decadent milieu, and in particular Ueda Bin, see Chapter 1. On Hearn as an Orientalist, see Tōda Masaru (2014); see also Sakamoto Masaki, Fukuzawa Kiyoshi, and Nishimaki Isamu (2012). 277 「自分が「お菊さん」の一巻を読んだのは英語の翻訳からでもあるし、又余程以前の事で[ある。]」

155 (Mordell, 1933, p. vii, p. ix).278 Hearn thus wrote about Loti: ‘No writer ever had such an effect upon me: and time strengthens my admiration. I hold him the greatest of living writers of the Impressionist School’ (Mordell, 1933, p. vi). This last sentence provides for an interesting insight into how Loti was read and appreciated at the turn of the century: as a representative of French fin de siècle, thanks to his easy flowery style and generous use of local colours, made the topoi of Symbolism accessible to a large readership. In his dated but remarkably exhaustive study, Keith Millward lists the many characteristics of Loti’s literature that can be directly indebted to ‘l’esprit fin de siècle’: ‘a constant need for new pleasures, new enjoyments’ (Millward, 1955, p. 329),279 a ‘desire for evasion’ (Millward, 1955, p. 33),280 a fascinated disgust for the ‘astounding hideousness of modernity’ (Millward, 1955, p. 131),281 and a ‘faculty for seeing everywhere the atrocious theme of Baudelaire’s “Une charogne”’ (Millward, 1955, p. 322),282 in other words, a fascination for death. Loti’s Orientalism is thus deeply linked with a desire to escape life and everything it entailed for a late- nineteenth century French bourgeois: moral values, familial responsibilities, economic efficiency, etc. ‘Countries that attract [him] are very often sleepy or dying: Japan, Egypt, Turkey (Les pays qui attirent ce voyageur sont très souvent les nations endormies et mourantes, Le Japon, l’Egypte, la Turquie)’ (Millward, 1955, p. 211) or rather, are perceived and described as such. In his representation of Japan, Loti uses many Decadent clichés about the exhaustion of civilization: the country is ‘running out of blood and running out of sap

278 Henry James writes that Pêcheurs d’Islande is ‘to my sense perfect [...] one of the very few works of imagination of our day completely and successfully beautiful’ (Ekström, 1953, p. 18). 279 ‘Un besoin constant de nouveaux plaisirs, de nouvelles jouissances’. Millward quotes the following extract from Aziyadé as ‘a very fin de siècle profession of faith (profession de foi bien fin de siècle)’: ‘There is no God, there is no moral, nothing exists from what we have been taught to respect; there is a life that passes, and it is logical to ask from it the most enjoyment possible, while waiting for the dreadful finale that is death. (Il n’y a pas de Dieu, il n’y a pas de morale, rien n’existe de tout ce qu’on nous a enseigné à respecter ; il y a une vie qui passe, à laquelle il est logique de demander le plus de jouissances possible, en attendant l’épouvantable finale qui est la mort…)’ (Millward, 1955, p. 329) 280 ‘Désir d’évasion’. This desire is never satisfied: ‘Abroad, Loti constantly dreams about coming back to Rochefort [his hometown]. Once he is settled at home, he has an Arab room built, where he can feel disoriented and escape the routine of everyday life (À l’étranger, Loti rêve sans cesse de son retour à Rochefort. Une fois installé chez lui, il se fait construire une chambre arabe, où il peut se dépayser, s’évader du train-train de la vie quotidienne)’ (Millward, 1955, p. 122). 281 ‘Stupéfiante laideur moderne’. We shall come back to this point below. 282 ‘Cette faculté de voir partout le thème atroce de la Charogne de Baudelaire’. Millward quotes this insightful if cruel review by François Mauriac, written in 1923, when Loti’s fame was fading: ‘For forty years, he has not stop one moment howling death. His whole work is nothing but a monotonous,

156 (À bout de sang et à bout de sève)’ (Madame Chrysanthème; Loti, 1888, p.34); a market in Kyoto ‘smells like the yellow race, like mould, and like death. (Tout cela sent la race jaune, la moisissure et la mort)’ (Japoneries d’automne; Loti, 1889, p. 54) This fascination-repulsion for the bizarre, the unnatural, the perverse, plays a role in his ambiguity towards Japan. When shown erotic ivory statuettes for sale by a young woman, Loti’s description draws on all the fin de siècle imagery:

Obscene and macabre, [the statuettes] have been created by brains which clearly go against the grain of ours, to be able to produce such frightfulness it cannot be named [...]. And this mousmé, with her perpetual smile, who displays with grace such monstrosity [...] is like a living allegory of her Japan, with all the childlike kindness on the surface, with its tireless patience, with, in its soul, things that we cannot understand, that are repugnant or scary... (La Troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune; Loti, 1936, p. 118)283

As shown by the vocabulary (obscene, monstrous, macabre, possibly the expression ‘against the grain’), and also by the insistence on the olfactory perception of death noticed above, Loti’s writing does exhibit ‘Baudelairean, and also Huysmansean, sensitivity’ (Millward, 1955, p. 262).284 What differentiates Loti from Baudelaire and Huysmans, however, is his unabated sentimentalism and his tendencies towards puritanism, which no doubt played a role in his commercial success as well as in his subsequent fall from grace.285 Even when objectifying others

heartrending lament (Lui, ne s’interrompt pas pendant quarante ans de hurler à la mort. Toute son œuvre n’est qu’une plainte monotone déchirante)’ (Millward, 1955, p. 203). 283 ‘De l’obscène et du macabre, amalgamés par des cervelles au rebours des nôtres, pour arriver à produire de l’effroyable qui n’a plus de nom [...]. Et cette mousmé au perpétuel sourire, étalant avec grâce tant de monstruosité [...] est comme une vivante allégorie de son Japon, aux puériles gentillesses de surface et aux inlassables patiences, avec, dans l’âme, des choses qu’on ne comprend pas, qui répugne ou qui font peur…’ 284 ‘Il possède au plus haut degré la sensibilité baudelairienne, huysmansienne aussi’. Hearn’s criticism of Loti as having become a ‘little morbid [...] Frenchman’ (see below) may be explained by the fact that these Decadent clichés were loosing their charm by the beginning of the new century. 285 Christopher Reed notices Loti’s ‘largely female novel reading public’ and adds: ‘“It’s women who buy me”, wrote Loti, fretting that Rossi’s illustrations for Madame Chrysanthème, which he thought made him look ugly, would decrease his sales’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 24). Understanding Loti’s readership as female opens an interesting perspective on his novels’ representation of gender and sexuality, which will be approached below.

157 in the most degrading ways, Loti has a way of reminding the reader of his good heart. When observing a young geisha, he wonders,

But what can there be, within this dancer’s little head, and within her little heart?... Always the same melancholic interrogation with no answer that I have often turned over concerning beings essentially different from me and unreadable, cats, monkeys, or children of human races very distant from ours, whose stare had entered mine through the deep route... (La Troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune; Loti, 1936, p. 56)286

Millward aptly writes that Loti’s ‘sadism hides behind a mask of pity’ (Millward, 1955, p. 325).287 Even when proclaiming their egotism, his alter ego protagonists never totally renounce bourgeois respectability. Lafcadio Hearn tempered his admiration for Loti after settling in Japan and marrying there, complaining that ‘Loti is unjust to the Japanese woman’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 10). 288 Today in Japan, Loti’s insensitivity towards Chrysanthème still attracts much criticism: ‘Rather than treating her like a human, he sees her as an object, and his gaze [is] extremely cold and full of despite’ (Ochiai, 1992, p. 101).289 The objectification of women in particular thus seems to be the core around which exoticism, racism, and decadence revolve. The most famous of Japanese responses to Loti’s depiction of Japan arguably comes from Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who also puts Loti’s depiction of Japanese women at the centre of his critique. The novella Butōkai (The Ball), published in Shinchō in January 1920, explicitly borrows the setting from Loti’s Japoneries

286 ‘Mais qu’est-ce qu’il peut bien y avoir, dans cette petite tête de danseuse, et dans ce petit cœur ?... Toujours la mélancolique interrogation sans réponse, que j’ai si souvent ressassée à propos d’êtres essentiellement différents de moi et indéchiffrables, chats, singes, ou enfants des races humaines très distantes de la nôtre, dont le regard était entré dans le mien par la route profonde…’ 287 ‘Ce sadisme qui se cache derrière un masque de pitié’. Millward gives examples of ways Loti’s sentimentalism and covert prudishness granted him many supporters during his lifetime, especially among his English-speaking readership. He quotes a British critic praising Loti for denouncing naturalism’s ‘perversions’: ‘Loti wrote out of the fullness of his heart. He had no need to wear high heels — measured by his sympathy, Pierre Loti towered above the sons of men!’ (Millward, 1955, p. 324). 288 It is interesting to notice that in his criticism of Loti, Hearn uses the same essentialist clichés that have been condemned in Loti for racism. Hearn indeed writes that Loti exemplifies ‘the French’s tendency to think only with their nerves, — and too much with the pudic nerve especially’, and that ‘the poet [has become] a little morbid modern affected Frenchman’ (C. Reed, 2010, p. 10). 289 「お菊さんを人間というよりは物扱いしていて、大変冷やで蔑視的な視点 [...]。」

158 d’automne (1889), where a ball given at the Rokumeikan in 1883 is mercilessly satirised by the French officer.

Well, the Rokumeikan is not beautiful! Built in the European style, very fresh, all white, all new, it looks like, my God! a casino in one of our provincial resort towns [...]. The tuxedo, which is already ugly when worn by Europeans, looks so peculiar on them [the Japanese]! They do not have the back built for this kind of clothing; it is impossible to say exactly why, but I always find in them a close resemblance with monkeys. And oh! The women! [...] What is it that is wrong with them? One tries to understand without really succeeding (Loti, 1889, p. 83).290

In his version, Akutagawa puts a young and beautiful Japanese lady, Akiko, at the centre of his narrative. She dances with a young French officer named Julien Viaud (the real name of Pierre Loti), without realising then or later that he is the famous writer. The Frenchman is entranced by Akiko’s beauty and tells her she would not be out of place in a Parisian ball. Seiji Lippit analyses the story as follows.

It is the collusion of these two gazes [Akiko’s and the officer’s] that generates the piece’s central thematic structure. Underlying this meeting is the textual encounter between Loti and Akutagawa, between an exoticizing and orientalist discourse and the gaze that appropriates, transforms and returns it. [...] The cosmopolitan space of the Rokumeikan [...] frames an image of Japanese modernity as a meeting ground of different cultures. [As Akutagawa writes,] “In truth, Akiko that night represented the full beauty of the Japanese girl of the Enlightenment” (Lippit, 2002, pp. 66-67).

290 ‘Eh bien, il n’est pas beau, le Rokou-Meïkan. Bâti à l’européenne, tout frais, tout blanc, tout neuf, il ressemble, mon Dieu, au casino d’une de nos villes de bains quelconque [...]. L’habit à queue, déjà si laid pour nous, comme ils le portent singulièrement ! Ils n’ont pas des dos construits pour ces sortes de choses, sans doute ; impossible de dire en quoi cela réside, mais je leur trouve à tous, et toujours, je ne sais quelle très proche ressemblance de singe. Oh ! et ces femmes ! [...] Qu’y a-t-il en elles qui ne va pas ? On cherche, on ne peut trop définir’.

159 Even though the ball at the Rokumeikan is described by Loti in Japoneries d’automne, Akutagawa’s story makes clear references to Madame Chrysanthème such as when the French officer wonders: ‘Can such a beautiful young girl as this reside after all like a doll in a house of paper and bamboo?’ At the beginning of Madame Chrysanthème, the narrator tells his friend Yves that he wants to find for himself a ‘little woman with yellow skin and the eyes of a cat [...] no taller than a doll (une petite femme à peau jaune, à cheveux noirs, à yeux de chat [...] pas plus haute qu’une poupée)’ and that they will all live together ‘in a house of paper (dans une maison de papier)’ (Loti, 1888, p. 12). Akutagawa’s aim here is to liberate the Japanese woman from the status of a silent object that Loti had assigned to her: not only does she express herself in the story — of which she is the primary narrator —, the Frenchman himself puts into question the idea that one can think of her as a ‘doll’. Adachi Naoko thus reads the story as illustrating Akutagawa’s longing for a place that allows for ‘the possibility of a real encounter between two individualities, beyond any national context’ (Adachi, 2013, p. 144).291 Kafū’s view on the objectified women in Madame Chrysanthème, expressed ten years before Akutagawa’s, seems quite different:

Those who made Pierre Loti love Japan the most, and understand Japan the best, are the musume and geishas of Nagasaki. Just like the Oriental beauty Aziyadé managed, with her love and her death, to transmit him the most mystical soul of Turkey, just like the dainty women of Tahiti had introduced him to the natural beauty of the Southern island, Chrysanthème and Prune, the geishas from Nagasaki, were the translators who told him the essence of the Japanese way of life, at least to a certain extent (KZ, vol. 9, p. 141).292

291 「国家という枠組みを超えたところでの＜個＞と＜個＞の真の出会いが可能であり得る [...]。」 292 「ピエール・ロチイをして最もよく日本を愛好せしめ、最も深く日本を解釈せしめたものは長崎のムスメと長崎の藝者である。長崎の藝者「お菊さん」や「お梅さん」は、東方の美女アジアデエが其の恋と死とによって、最も神秘なる土耳古の魂を彼に伝へたるが如く、又タイチ島の可憐なる女性が南洋絶島の自然美を紹介したるが如くに、少くとも或る程度まで日本的生活の奥秘を彼に語つた通訳者である。」

160 For Kafū, each of these women’s value resides not so much in their individuality but rather in the way they embody the culture they come from. Chrysanthème and Prune did not need to talk to Loti, nor did Loti needed to listen to them, in order to ‘translate’ the essence of Japan: they are themselves a precious crystallisation of this essence. Stephen Snyder has analysed how Kafū’s predilection for the world of prostitution is in part due to his love for French Naturalism and underlines Kafū’s affinity with Loti within this shared fascination.293 One may add that what prostitution, Orientalism and Aestheticism have in common is the dehumanisation of the female body. Thus in Loti’s writings, it is clear that the more women appear dehumanised, the more lovable they are. In La Troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune, he writes with delight about a young geisha dancer he finds adorable:

Enters the strangest little being I have ever seen over my worldly travels, half doll, half cat [...]. I am no longer bored, I am no longer lonely; I have met the toy I may have vaguely desired my entire life: a kitten that speaks (Loti, 1936, p. 16).294

Another one is

a little cicada with no tomorrow, a little creature that exists only through its ephemeral grace and the shimmer of its attire, just like a butterfly hatched only to charm our eyes (Loti, 1936, p. 53).

Dehumanisation, a central element of the decadent aesthetic according to David Weir as already mentioned, is here working towards the aestheticisation of women; women are in this type of discourses celebrated through their

293 See ‘Udekurabe: The Demimonde East and West’ (Snyder, 2000, pp. 54-91). One of the merits of Snyder’s approach is to remind us that in Madame Chrysanthème, the relationship between Loti and Chrysanthème is never described in terms of love but is clearly based on a financial transaction — a point that the numerous re-writings which cast the female character in the role of the abandoned lover, from Régamey’s to John Luther Long’s, conveniently ignore. 294 ‘Ensuite paraît le plus étrange petit être que j’aie jamais vu dans mes courses par le monde, moitié poupée et moitié chat [...]. Je ne m’ennuie plus, je ne suis plus seul ; j’ai rencontré le jouet que j’avais peut-être vaguement désiré toute ma vie : un petit chat qui parle.’; ‘petite cigale sans lendemain, petite créature qui n’existe que par la grâce éphémère et le chatoiement des atours, à l’égal de quelque papillon éclos pour charmer nos yeux’.

161 objectification.295 Pierre Loti is thus representative of the highly paradoxical gender politics of decadence, at once celebrating female beauty and endorsing feminine values while denying women their humanity.296 Aside from the passages quoted above, numerous hints can be found in Kafū’s works of his admiration for Loti. The legend goes that, when he died, Kafū who had lost most of his personal possession during air raids only had with him a couple of French books, among them Loti’s Le Livre de la pitié et de la mort.297 Hutchison also notices that ‘Kafū was familiar with Loti’s work and had discussed his novel Le Roman d’un Spahi at some length in Saiyū-nisshishō’ (Hutchison, 2012, p. 109). The essay Piēru Lochii to Nihon no fūkei (Pierre Loti and the Japanese Landscape), published in 1911 in Mita bungaku (republished as an annex to the first edition of Sangoshū in 1913), is fascinating in the way it very clearly explains the Japanese author’s view on Loti.

Loti is not a hateful observer who wanted to denounce Japan. He is a poet to the core, a romantic poet ceaselessly pursued by dreams of loneliness and anxiety. Impatient to remove himself from the modern world of Europe, he looked for the beautiful nature and the naïve humanity of a distant island like Tahiti in the Southern seas, or, dreaming of civilisations from a distant past, the mystical and mysterious air of the dying cities of sleepy India and Turkey. There is no doubt that Loti had been imagining for a long time the Japan of butterflies, flowers and women that one can see in ukiyoe. However, the real Japan that he saw for the first time when, arriving in Nagasaki, he gazed at the shore, was frightfully different from the land he had imagined (KZ, vol. 9, p. 135).298

295 Théophile Gautier claimed that he has always ‘favoured the statue over the woman and marble over flesh. (préféré la statue à la femme et le marbre à la chair.)’ (Guégan, 2011, p. 89). 296 See David Weir on the subject: ‘Decadent writers have no sympathy at all for the vigorous, masculine world of the bourgeois businessman. On the contrary, they willingly accept the idea that they, like women, are outside that world. [...] But this negative reaction to conventional notions of masculinity does not necessarily involve an endorsement of feminism. [Elaine] Showalter says that “[t]his paradox is at the heart of fin-de-siècle culture. Indeed, strongly anti-patriarchal sentiments could also coexist comfortably with misogyny”’ (Weir, 1995, p. 18). 297 According to the specialist of French literature Ōtsuka Yukio (Satō T., 1988, p. 11). Kafū himself writes about reading this book in his diary, on 23 November, 1933 (Satō T., 1988, p. 38). See also Stephen Snyder (2000, p. 64). 298 「ロチイは強ひて日本を嫌悪し罵倒しようとして、日本の国土を観察したのではない。ロチイは飽くまで詩人である。絶えず寂寞不安の夢に追はるるロマンチックの詩人である。彼は南洋タイチの如き

162 Kafū reads Loti as a poetically sensitive remainder of what a ‘beautiful paradise’ Japan once was according to an aestheticised vision of the past.299 As an Orientalist who explicitly looks for culturally pure beauty — that is to say, seemingly unspoilt by modern European influence — wherever he goes, Loti is for Kafū an ideal allie in his pursuit of pre-modern Japan seen through the lens of French Decadence. Loti’s main concern, according to Kafū, is therefore to ask: ‘What will there be left on this land of Japan [...] when the beauty of the Japanese landscape will have been unsparingly destroyed in the name of the “progress” of civilisation?’ (KZ, vol. 9, p. 133)300 Seeing a similarity in Loti’s disappointment in Japan due to the gap between reality and expectation based on artistic representations and Kafū’s reaction to France in Furansu monogatari, Stephen Snyder writes about Loti’s influence on Kafū’s anti- modern stance: ‘The same French literature that, in effect, spoiled France for him becomes, with Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, a means of spoiling Japan as well’ (Snyder, 2000, p. 65). It would be more correct to say that Kafū uses Loti as a supporting argument within his own aesthetic quest as a Japanese writer. It is all the more striking that, despite several allusions to Madame Chrysanthème in his diary and in Bokutō kidan (Snyder, 2000, p. 64 and p. 150), Kafū explicitly dismisses Madame Chrysanthème as unimportant in his only text exclusively dedicated to the French author, going as far as to pretend that he does ‘not even remember [its] plot clearly’ (KZ, vol. 9, p. 131).301 Kafū choses to focus instead on the lesser-known La troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905), where the main argument consists of lamenting the changes that have affected Japan since the late 1880s, when Loti first visited. Loti’s last book on Japan is the only one written after the Russo-Japanese War and expresses without a doubt a more nostalgic view on Japan than any other of Loti’s work. Returning 15 years after his last visit, Loti wants to believe that ‘Whatever has

遠島の美しき自然と純朴なる人情に接し、或は過去幾代の文明の夢み眠れる印度土耳古の如き、神秘不可思議なる廃都の空気に触れてしばしなりと欧州近世の世界より身を脱離せんと急つてゐる。疑ひもなくロチイは久しき以前より浮世絵に見たるが如き蝶と花と女の日本を空想して止まなかつたに違ひない。然しながら、初めて長崎に到着して其の海岸を眺めた事実の日本は、驚くほど彼が空想の国土とは相違してゐた。」 299 ‘[Loti’s text] is a powerful hint towards acknowledging how much this place called Japan is a beautiful Asian paradise’ (KZ, vol. 9, p. 132).「如何に日本と云ふ処が東洋中のうつくしい楽園であるかを知らせる有力な伏線になつてゐる。」 300 「将来に於て日本の風景美が文明の「進化」の為めに惜し気もなく破壊されてしまつたなら、 [...] 日本の国土に何が残るであろう。」 301 「今では明かに篇中の事件をも記憶してゐない位である。」

163 been said, it does still exist, this distant Japan, despite the wind of madness that makes it transform and self-destroy. (Quoi qu’on en ait dit, il existe bien toujours, ce Japon lointain, malgré le vent de folie qui le pousse à se transformer et à se détruire)’ (Loti, 1936, p. 8). Confronted with his own loss of youth, Loti does not cease to state his melancholy: ‘I had known these things during summer’s splendour; I find them back in December, and the winter of the year — maybe the winter of my life [...]. (Mais j’avais connu ces choses à la splendeur de l’été ; or, je les retrouve en décembre, et l’hiver de l’année, — peut-être aussi l’hiver de ma vie [...].)’ (Loti, 1936, p. 14). The root of this sadness lies within Loti’s own depression but is constantly triggered by sights of modernisation that spoils his pleasure at rekindling with old memories.

The Lord, to receive us, has put back on his long silky robes; if not for his hair cut short, he would have been just like a Japanese from old times. When it comes to the décor, it is also very pure, except for the electric light, too modern, which falls here and there from the ceiling (Loti, 1936, p. 46).302

The striking image of a traditional Japanese sight being spoilt by electric light sums up very well Loti’s approach to Japan.303 That it is often rendered through a racist discourse seems to be of little importance to Kafū. On the contrary, he agrees with Loti’s cruel caricature of the Japanese ‘monkeying’ the Europeans, praising the French author for ‘saying without restraint that, once Nagasaki has become just like Le Havre in France or Portsmouth in England, [...] only the most physically hideous humans will be left there’ (KZ, vol. 9, pp. 132-133).304 Moreover, Kafū claims for himself the racialist vocabulary used by Loti:

When condemning the progress of Japan in the ways Loti does, one should feel an even more obvious distaste for those who have forced Western civilisation on the yellow race to begin with, the Americans. Is it

302 ‘Le seigneur, pour nous recevoir, a repris ses longues robes de soie ; n’étaient ses cheveux coupés court, il serait redevenu un Japonais du vieux temps. Quant au décor, il est aussi très pur, sauf la lumière électrique, la trop moderne lumière, qui tombe ça et là du plafond’. 303 Antoine Compagnon has analysed the crucial role played by modern lighting (gas and electric) in Baudelaire’s description of the modern city (Compagnon, 2014).

164 not indeed because of the efforts of the Anglo-Saxon race that the rare lands of the world, from the East to the South, have been turned into banality, to the point where Loti thinks there is nothing interesting anymore in travelling? (KZ, vol. 9, p. 133)305

In this criticism of the loss of local colour that spoils the joys of travelling, for which the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ is deemed responsible, Kafū faithfully echoes Loti’s worldview. In Madame Chrysanthème already, he had written: ‘There will come a time when the earth will be very boring to inhabit, when it will have been made similar from one end to the other, and when even travelling will be a distraction no more (Il viendra un temps où la terre sera bien ennuyeuse à habiter, quand on l’aura rendue pareille d’un bout à l’autre, et qu’on ne pourra même plus essayer de voyager pour se distraire un peu)’ (Loti, 1888, p. 57). Loti’s hatred of the British is also very apparent in his works, and he does not hesitate to use against them the same derogatory comparisons with monkeys and apes that, when applied to the Japanese, have called upon him so much criticism. When in Kyoto, Loti indeed notices ‘English misses’ who are ‘frolicking in the garden allées with the childish gaieties of babies [in English], as graceful as orang-utangs’ (Japoneries d’automne; Loti, 1889, p. 64).306 One may suggest that, from passages such as these, Kafū did not understand Loti’s racism as colonial bias so much as a way to establish a hierarchy between different groups of people based not only on racial but also on aesthetic criteria. As an aesthete and a dandy, Kafū himself may have felt excluded from Loti’s racist objectification of others, just as he had adopted an outsider’s stance towards Meiji Japan. Kafū thus prefers to see the similarities that link him to Loti rather than their

304 「長崎は仏国のルアブルや英国のポオツマウスと同じやうになり、[...] ロチイは遠慮なく、肉体上から見て世界中で最も醜悪な人間が残るばかりだ。と云つてゐる。」 305 「此の如くロチイは日本の進化を呪ふにつけて、最初にこの危険なる黄人種に向つて泰西の文明を強ひ教へた亜米利加人に対しては、更に甚しく増悪の情を感じなければならぬ。東洋南洋到る処、世界の珍奇なる国土を平凡化して了つて、遂にロチイをして旅行は何等の興味もないものと思はせるに至らしめたのは、実にアングロサキソン人種の勢力の為めではないか。」 306 ‘Misses anglaises [...] folâtrer dans les allées du jardin, avec des gaietés enfantines de babies et des graces d’orang-outang’. Pierre Jourda notices that ‘According to Loti, the political manoeuvres of the British have created suffering all around the globe. Mort de Philae is a long expectoration of hatred against the British, guilty of exploiting Egypt, which loss of specificity Loti denounces, and the book turns into a real xenophobic manifesto. (A en croire Loti, les manœuvres politiques de l’Angleterre ont entraîné de la souffrance à tous les coins du monde. La Mort de Philae est une longue expectoration de haine contre les Anglais coupables d’exploiter l’Egypte, dont Loti dénonce la banalisation, et ce livre devient un vrai manifeste xénophobe)’ (Jourda, 1956, p. 276).

165 racial divide: both present themselves as part of a dilettante elite that does not abide by the same principles ruling the materialistic modern world. In 1927, Paul Morand, following in Loti’s footsteps, laments that ‘travelling will be soon [...] synonymous with adoring disappearing features (voyager, ce sera bientôt [...] adorer des traits qui s’effacent’ (Rien que la terre ; Morand, 2001, p. 827). In 1931, he further reflects on the homogenisation of the world.

Today when the West, having reached the penultimate degree of overproduction, of speed, of anaemia and neurosis, glimpses, as the only remedy to an upcoming catastrophe, the necessity to slow down the rhythm of life, to refrain its needs and to not yield to all material requirements, it would gladly look towards Asia, asking it its secrets of antique wisdom. But the surrendered and appeased Asia has disappeared; the whole world lives under the sign of the machine, the inept and lifeless machine [...], which only knows how to magnify the vices of humanity, whose faculty to understand and love has not grown with the faculty to invent. Of this battle from Apocalypse, who can tell the outcome? One day may come when there will not even be Orient and Occident, but one only miserable terrestrial nation questioning the interplanetary space through light signals (Papiers d’identité; Morand, 1931, pp. 205-206).307

Morand, heir to a long line of anti-modern writers, sees a sign of decadence in technical progress, as it tears man away from the spiritual qualities that make him human (namely, the capacity to feel, love, and appreciate beauty) and reduces him to his materiality. In doing so, modernity erases all the human specificities that make men from different backgrounds distinct from each other. In prioritising aesthetics above anything else, the tenants of Decadence thus find a common ground in their

307 ‘Aujourd’hui que l’Occident, arrivé à l’avant-dernier degré de la surproduction, de la vitesse, de l’anémie et de la névrose entrevoit, comme remède unique à une prochaine catastrophe, la nécessité de ralentir le rythme de sa vie, de réfréner ses besoins et de ne pas céder à toutes les exigences de la matière, il se tournerait volontiers vers l’Asie, lui demandant ses secrets d’antique sagesse. Mais l’Asie renonçante et apaisée a disparu ; le monde entier vit désormais sous le signe de la machine, de la machine inepte et sans vie, [...] qui ne sait que magnifier les vices d’une humanité dont la faculté de comprendre et d’aimer n’a pas crû en même temps que sa faculté d’inventer. De cette lutte qui relève de l’Apocalypse, qui dira l’issue ? Un jour viendra peut-être où il n’y aura même plus d’Orient ni d’Occident, mais une seule misérable nation terrestre interrogeant l’espace interplanétaire à coups de signaux lumineux’. ‘Orient contre Occident’.

166 belief that the modern loss of national identities is linked to humanity loosing its essence.

167 Conclusion

In the short story Taiken (Lassitude, 1910), Kafū writes the following:

The moment when any civilisation reaches its extreme coincides with the decay and decline [haitai suibi] of its popular mind. Just like the aging European civilisation gave birth to the French poet Baudelaire, in Asia, the civilisation of Edo had clear tendencies towards Decadence; the literary and artistic productions of the time show that men of the world such as fiction writers [gesakusha] and haiku poets interpreted humorously men’s emotions and passions, [...] and tried to escape a world of struggle and labour into the isolation of an individualistic thought (KZ, vol. 7, p. 301).308

In this quote are summed up all the main elements of Japanese Decadence I have focused on in this study: an identification with French Decadence through the key figure of Baudelaire, an amused distancing from men’s daily passions and struggles, and a radical individualistic stance that places the Decadent out of the world. The aim of this study was to capture Decadence as an essentially global phenomenon and, subsequently, to show that the Japanese take on Decadence uses the Decadent gaze inherited from French literature to re-visit and re-create a new type of Japaneseness. This recreation enterprise starts at the linguistic level, as analysed in Chapter One. The translation of Decadent texts does not only introduce new literary paradigms within the Japanese literary world, it also contributes to shape new networks and to promote new actors; translation provides new foundations for literary creativity. As Pascale Casanova writes in The World Republic of Letters, ‘translation, like criticism, is a process of establishing value’ (Casanova, 2004, p. 23), and an active process of shifting values can be observed within the Japanese literary world around key texts that blur the limits between translation, criticism, and creation. In

308 「何れの民族にもせよ、其処に発生した一代の文明の究極する処は人心の廃頽衰微であらう。次第に老い行く欧州近世の文明が仏蘭西に詩人ボードレールを生んだ如く、東洋の江戸文明は夙に通人戯作者俳諧師の思想中に、諸る人間の感激熱情を滑稽的に解釈し、[...] 奮闘努力の世界から逃れて、唯我的思想の隔離を企てたやうな著しいデカダンスの傾向を示した事は、当時の文芸的作品によって伺ひ知る事が出来る。」

168 Chapter Two, I analysed Japanese Decadence’s role in reorganising these shifting values around the three key notions of Naturalism, Aestheticism, and individualism. In Part Two, I showed the paradoxes of the Decadent exile in France and Japan alike: a deep questioning of modern society and bigotry that, in the name of individualism, rejects cultural, linguistic, and geographical boundaries, while magnifying otherness through exoticism. Regina Gagnier, in her interpretation of Decadence as a degradation of the relation between part and whole, insists on the often hidden but fundamental question of Western dominance within Decadence:

Under the pressures of economic globalization, [...] many writers [...] viewed western civilization itself as the egotism of a part that threatened the survival of the whole. And here is where the Decadent figure became more like the biological figure of cancer — when one cell exceeds the regulating system of the organism and develops at the expense of the whole. If Decadence indicated when the individuation of parts endangered the survival of the whole, the enormous transfers of wealth from India, Latin America, and China to Europe and North America [...] was seen by perceptive governors and travellers as precisely the Decadence of the West. See Ruskin’s description of Europe and its empires as baptized in Turner’s light: “Light over all the world. Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house, — a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with death from pole to pole.” (Gagnier, 2010, p. 21).

Looking at Orientalism from a Japanese perspective is a way to build a multi-layered understanding of the question of Western imperialism and its culturally predatory relationship to otherness. As I have observed through the Japanese reception of Pierre Loti in Chapter Four, French exoticism cannot be subsumed under a unilateral appropriation of simplified versions of the non-Western other. Kafū uses Loti’s essentialism to express his own, Japanese writer’s idea of Japan. The case of Kafū also shows how Loti’s fixation with an ‘authentic’ Japan untouched by modernity can lead to a potent critique of Meiji Japan’s militarism. Observing how the first victims of Japanese imperialism are the Japanese lower classes, Loti writes in La Troisième jeunesse de Madame Prune:

169 They used to be privileged and happy, these peasants, until the day the contagious panic that it is agreed to call progress appeared in their country. [...] Soon, we shall see them by thousands and hundreds litter with their bodies the plains of Manchuria, where the next war will unavoidably happen... Poor little Japanese peasants! (Loti, 1936, p. 202).309

Loti’s paternalistic self-righteousness allows him to comment from a position of superiority that Kafū co-opts for his own criticism of Meiji Japan; Kafū thus quotes Loti: ‘Loti says “poor little Japanese peasants” and [deplores how] the government is taking from them money to make cannons and tanks, turning them into victims of the war’ (KZ, vol. 9, p. 135).310 Focusing on Kafū throughout this thesis has allowed me to explore the political dimension of Aestheticism within Decadence. Mattei Calinescu remarks that

After À Rebours, decadent aestheticism becomes more conscious of its critical-polemical functions and is less prone to take itself as the solution to the painful uncertainties and contradictions of modern life. Aestheticism, even in its most offensive forms, is no longer cut off from various concerns of practical life and, more than that, can no longer be regarded as incompatible with the possibility of moral, religious, or political commitments by its adherents (Calinescu, 1987, p. 174).

Through Antoine Compagnon’s notion of the anti-modern, I highlighted how Decadent escapism can also be interpreted as a protest against the modern world. As Sasabuchi Tomoichi notices, Kafū stands out in this regard among the other Japanese Decadents. Quoting Tanizaki as saying ‘I do not have the spirit of defiance and of social criticism that Professor [Kafū] has’ (Sasabuchi, 1976, p. 63), 311 Sasabuchi

309 ‘Ils étaient des privilégiés et des heureux de ce monde, ces paysans-là, jusqu’au jour où l’affolement contagieux, qu’on est convenu d’appeler le progrès, a fait son apparition dans leur pays. [...] Et bientôt on les enverra, par milliers et centaine de milliers, joncher de leurs cadavres ces plaines de Mandchourie, où doit se dérouler la guerre inévitable et prochaine… Pauvres petites paysans japonais !’ 310 「ロチイは哀れなる小さな日本の農夫等よと呼び、政府からは新しい大砲と軍艦の製造費を徴収され [...] 戦乱の犠牲となつて」 311 「私には先生のやうな反骨や社会批評の精神がない。」

170 comments that ‘Tanizaki’s Aestheticism [...] does not focus, like Kafū’s, on social decline, but on personal, ethical decline’ (Sasabuchi, 1976, p. 63).312 This political dimension of the Decadent drive for isolation takes on another dimension when considered in the context of the decades following the 1920s. Several elements of Decadence we have touched upon in the thesis, such as the notion of ‘cultural aristocrat’, elitist individualism, and its ingrained distaste for mass culture, suggest that Decadence is firmly oriented to the right or far-right end of the political spectrum. The notion of decadence, having at its core the belief that the present does not offer the same moral and aesthetic standards as the past, is ultimately linked with reactionary political thought, ultra-nationalism and, in the case of Europe, fascism. I have shown throughout this thesis how the likes of Baudelaire, Flaubert, or the Goncourt brothers did not conceal their opposition to democracy as a political system. Key figures of French Decadence such as Huysmans and Bourget ended their lives as outspoken advocates for a most traditional form of Catholicism. In the 1930s and 1940s, numerous modernist writers, inheriting from Decadence their dismissal of reason, extreme Aestheticism, and elitist individualism, became in one way of another entangled with fascism. I have mentioned in this thesis the case of Paul Morand, but many others come to mind, such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle in France and Ezra Pound in the English-speaking world. In Japan, Mishima Yukio’s literature appears as the perfect synthesis of the Decadent heritage and ultra-nationalist fantasies. In Japan in the mid-1930s, the understanding of decadence becomes directly political as it is taken over by the far right and used as an argument for a shift towards an effective promotion of traditional values. The Artistic and Cultural Renaissance (bungei fukkō) of 1933-1937 can be seen as the symbolic moment when the Japanese intellectuals took into account the shift to ultra-nationalism of the Japanese government (Hira, 2015, pp. 12-13). One of the main events marking this change of paradigm is the creation of the Japanese Romantic School, which defined their intellectual and aesthetic opposition to modernity by claiming the heritage of German romanticism (see Nishimura Masahiro, 2003; Kevin Doak, 1994). During the war, this new interpretation of decadence culminated in the attempt to ‘overcome modernity’,

312 「谷崎の耽美主義 [...] は荷風のように社会的堕落ではなく、人格的、倫理的堕落を意味[する。]」 Watanabe Naomi also writes that Tanizaki can be considered ‘non-ideological [mushisō]’ (Watanabe N., 1992, p. 28).

171 as the famous 1942 gathering of leading Japanese cultural authorities proclaimed (see Richard Calichman, 2008). However, there is no simple link between the Decadent critique of modernity and the ultra-nationalist urge to ‘overcome modernity’, and the refusal of the two key figures of Japanese Decadence, Nagai Kafū and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, to actively collaborate with the government during its ultra-nationalist phase illustrates this point very clearly. An explanation of Kafū’s and Tanizaki’s attitude towards Japan’s established nationalism, which stand out among the docility of their peers towards authority, especially during the war years, may be found in Decadence itself. The absolute rejection of groupism and institutions, as well as the radical individualism that the two writers developed at the contact of French Decadence, may have played a major role in shaping their unyielding stance. A future expansion of the present study would consist in understanding the paradox of a seemingly opposite political rendering of Decadence among some writers in Europe and in Japan. While the daily experience of a relatively individualistic society may have pushed European Decadents towards aspirations for a stricter social order, the same individualistic Aestheticism may have been translated within the Japanese context as a direct and uncompromising call for total individual independence. The study of Decadence as a prism to analyse some of the main paradigms of a globalising world literature thus needs to be carried on further.

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